Chris Powell: Eastern Conn. State U. tries to revive the ‘noble savage’ myth
Exhibit at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, near the tribe’s Foxwoods Resort Casino, in eastern Connecticut.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Having realized that it had been overlooking a prerequisite of political correctness in academia, Eastern Connecticut State University, in Windham, this month adopted a formal “land acknowledgment" that will be ceremoniously proclaimed at the start of major university events.
It reads: “We respectfully acknowledge that the land on which Eastern Connecticut State University stands, and the broader land now known as the State of Connecticut, is the ancestral territory of the Eastern Pequot Tribal Nation, Golden Hill Paugussett Tribe, Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation, Mohegan Tribe, Nipmuc Tribe, and Schaghticoke Tribe, who have stewarded this land throughout the generations with great care. We honor their resilience, cultural heritage, and enduring presence. As Connecticut’s public liberal arts university, we are committed to fostering greater awareness of Indigenous histories and contemporary experiences, and to building relationships grounded in respect, reciprocity, and responsibility."
And so the university now will perpetuate the myth and stereotype of the “noble savage": that the Indians of old were good, one with nature, eternally peaceful, and uncorrupted by civilization, unlike the civilization that succeeded theirs, of which everyone should be ashamed.
Of course, the struggle for land and sovereignty is not peculiar to Connecticut. While the struggle is fortunately concluded in the United States, it is the history of humanity and continues throughout the world. Even the “noble savages" of old, including those in what became Connecticut, struggled with each other for land and sovereignty before the European tribe came to dominate the area three centuries ago by making alliance with the Mohegans and Narragansetts to eradicate the troublesome Pequots.
The university says the Indian tribes of old “have stewarded this land throughout the generations with great care."
Huh? The tribes of old were mainly hunters and foragers, not industrialists. They didn't build roads, dams, sawmills, schools, factories, and railroads. They didn't make great advancements in medicine. They sometimes practiced slavery and polygamy. Any stewardship they performed ended centuries ago.
That is, they were people of their time and culture, as their adversaries were, and as everyone is.
But now that some of their ultra-distant descendants have obtained lucrative state grants of exclusivity, their “stewardship” includes casinos, through which some of them have accumulated great wealth that is imagined to be reparations for wrongs done to their ultra-distant ancestors, even as their casinos nurture costly addictions to gambling, which an ever-ravenous state government happily whitewashes when it shares the profits.
Indeed, it's unlikely that Eastern would nurture this obsession with ancestry if there wasn't casino money in it, since ancestor worship is emphatically un-American. The Mother of Exiles says so herself from New York Harbor: “‘Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp,’ cries she with silent lips.’’
That is, in the civilization now operating in these parts one's ancestry doesn't matter any more than anyone else's does, and everyone who has lived here a little while becomes as “indigenous” as everyone else is.
Despite its many faults, the current civilization at least has greatly diminished, if not quite eliminated, tribalism, what with Eastern and other institutions of higher education trying to revive it with “land acknowledgments."
Contrary to Eastern's implication, no one today is guilty of the injustices of the distant past, and even back then there was plenty of guilt to go around. If guilt is to be imposed, the present offers injustices enough. They won't be corrected by the politically correct posturing that is sinking higher education.
ARE THEY US?: A few days ago Connecticut got another invitation to take a good look at itself.
State police said a pedestrian was killed on Interstate 95 in Stamford when he was struck by four cars -- and the first three drivers fled the scene. Maybe the fourth would have fled as well if his car hadn't been disabled in the collision.
Could all the drivers really have thought that they had hit a deer or a bear, not a person? Who are these people? Are they us?
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Chris Powell: The case for vegetarianism is getting stronger
“The Butcher and his Servant’’ (1568), drawn and engraved by Jost Amman
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Wesleyan University, in Middletown, Conn., often rivals Yale University in New Haven for nutty political correctness, and that's how many people perceived its most recent news. A group of Wesleyan students, faculty members, and alumni has asked the university to erect a plaque outside the university's dining hall to memorialize all the animals killed for the food eaten inside.
Such a plaque would be a rebuke not just to meat eaters on campus but to the university itself, so it's hard to see how Wesleyan could erect it without also taking meat off the dining hall menu and formally converting the campus to vegetarianism. Once the plaque was erected, anything less would be hypocrisy.
Such a plaque also might make the university's priorities seem strange, what with poverty, homelessness, child neglect, and other human ills worsening throughout Connecticut, often within sight of the university.
Even so, the plaque concludes: “There will come a time when we will look back on this treatment of our fellow animals as indefensible. We will recognize that all animals feel, think, love, and strive to live -- even those who do not look or behave exactly as humans do -- and that their lives are as precious to them as ours are to us."
Pigs being transported to be slaughtered and eaten, much of the meat as bacon.
This is not so nutty, insofar as society has already conceded some of it in principle with laws against gratuitous cruelty to animals. But vegetarianism is up against all history, starting with animals themselves, many of which have no scruples against eating each other.
In Genesis the Bible conveys divine approval for eating meat: “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the Earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the Earth."
Indeed, without the meat industry many animal species and breeds, being raised primarily for food, might virtually disappear. Who would go through the trouble and expense of raising beef cattle just for the sake of biodiversity?
But guilt about eating meat is not peculiar to Wesleyan. There is much ethics-based vegetarianism in Hinduism, and some American Indian tribes offered prayers of thanks to honor the animals they hunted for food, though whether this was sincere respect or just rationalization for participating in the kill is arguable. Few people ordering hamburgers have to witness the prerequisite slaughtering and butchering of the animals that their meat comes from. Witnessing such spectacles in the stockyards and meat-packing factories can depress appetites.
Of course, vegetarianism does not automatically confer goodness. Taking a break from plotting mass murder in November 1941, Hitler assured his dinner companions, “The future belongs to us vegetarians."
It's still better that he lost the war.
But the case for vegetarianism, or at least for greater respect for animals, is getting stronger for new reasons.
Companion animals, particularly dogs and cats, long have been famous for their sometimes uncanny ability to communicate with and protect people. But in recent years home videos posted on the Internet have proven what had been mainly anecdotal -- the astounding intelligence and ability to communicate with humans possessed not just by dogs and cats but even by wild animals, farm animals, and birds as well.
Amelia Thomas, a journalist, animal scientist, and farmer in Canada, has detailed this in a fascinating new book, What Sheep Think About the Weather: How to Listen to What Animals Are Trying to Say.
“There's no us and them," Thomas says. “Rather, infinite varieties of us."
Chimpanzees are humans’ closest relatives.
Having worked a little with chimpanzees, some of whom have learned American sign language, Thomas quotes the primatologist Mary Lee Jensvold: “The more you appreciate what thinking beings they are, the more you also understand the depth of their suffering."
There are no chimps on the menu at Wesleyan, but if the vegetarian plaque is erected there, over time it may get harder to argue with.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government, politics and other topics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Chris Powell: Designed to prohibit housing affordability
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Perhaps taking a hint from socialist Democrat Zohran Mamdani's successful campaign for mayor of New York City, whose slogan was “A city we can afford," politicians in both parties in Connecticut are taking “affordability" for their own platforms.
Some Connecticut Democrats, including Gov. Ned Lamont, have even attributed their party's success in this month's municipal elections to a supposed commitment to affordability. This is laughable. Far more votes were probably pushed toward the Democrats by the political chaos in Washington than by any achievement in “affordability" in Connecticut, though the six-week partial shutdown of the federal government was an entirely Democratic stunt, not President Trump's doing.
Yes, Connecticut's Democratic state administration hasn't raised taxes much lately, but municipal property taxes still go up because state law and policy determine much of how municipalities spend their money. These days there's not much difference between state and municipal finance.
Greenwich state Sen. Ryan Fazio, a candidate for the Republican nomination for governor next year, pressed the “affordability" theme in response to Lamont's declaration of candidacy for a third term.
“Governor Lamont's first eight years in office," Fazio said, “have seen Connecticut's electricity rates rise to the third-highest in the nation, and our economic growth plummet to fourth worst in the country. Families are struggling to make ends meet, while people and jobs are leaving our state. … I am running for governor to make our state more affordable and safe and create opportunities for all."
Connecticut's increasing unaffordability has been caused to a great extent by the explosion of federal spending and debt, for which the state's members of Congress, all Democrats, share responsibility.
But much of Connecticut's unaffordability is also caused by the state's own law and policy. Indeed, state law and policy virtually prohibit affordability by preventing ordinary efficiency in government, and affordability will never be achieved if this isn't spelled out.
For example, Connecticut didn't enact collective bargaining for government employees and binding arbitration for their union contracts in pursuit of affordability. Collective bargaining and binding arbitration for government employees had the effect of driving up government's costs, relieving elected officials of difficult responsibility, and sustaining a powerful special interest that serves as the army of the majority party, the Democrats.
These laws forbid ordinary democratic control and accountability in public administration.
Connecticut didn't enact its minimum budget requirement for school systems in pursuit of affordability. The minimum budget requirement, which virtually prohibits economizing in school systems even if student enrollment falls substantially, was enacted to ensure that any financial savings in schools would be transferred to school employees, particularly teachers, rather than refunded to taxpayers.
Nor did Connecticut enact its “public benefits charges" -- essentially taxes on electricity -- to make life in the state more affordable but to conceal the costs of welfare and “green" energy programs in electricity bills so people would blame the electric utilities for electricity's high cost, though the utilities, at the command of state law, stopped generating electricity years ago and now only distribute it.
At least Republican state legislators, a small minority in the General Assembly, recently made an issue of the “public benefits charges" and the majority Democrats found them hard to defend, so some were removed from electric bills. But they were not eliminated. Instead state government now is paying for the “public benefits" with bond money, which will cost state residents even more in the long run.
The “public benefits charges" were an easy target. The special interests dependent on them, welfare recipients and self-styled environmentalists, are not so influential. But collective bargaining and binding arbitration for state and local government employees have huge special-interest constituencies, as does the minimum budget requirement for schools.
Those anti-affordability laws are far more expensive than the “public benefits charges," and no politician is likely to criticize them, though there will be little affordability in the state until they are repealed or reduced in scope.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Chris Powell: Special-interest politics support “nips’’ pollution
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Next time you come upon empty and discarded “nip" bottles -- the tiny plastic containers of liquor sold in abundance at Connecticut's liquor stores but neither returnable for deposits nor recyclable -- Larry Cafero wants you to be thankful.
Cafero, executive director of the Connecticut Wine and Spirit Wholesalers, announced the other day that the 5-cent de-facto tax on nip bottles has generated more than $19 million since it began four years ago, with the money distributed by the state to municipalities in proportion to the number of “nips" sold in each. Municipal governments are to use the money for environmental-cleanup purposes.
The problem is that only a little of the money is used to recover the discarded nip bottles themselves. Such an undertaking would be extremely labor-intensive. Instead municipalities use the money to run recycling centers or other programs to reduce litter or protect the environment.
So the nip bottles keep defacing streets, parks, and the countryside, being collected only partially and put in trash cans by people who go for nature walks and are disgusted by Connecticut's policy of letting nature be defaced so a special interest can keep making money off a product that has only pernicious effects -- the strewing of unbiodegradable trash throughout the state and the facilitation of drunken driving and underage drinking.
Other than gratifying the liquor industry, there is no need for this stuff. Connecticut could forbid the sale of nip bottles, as alcoholism-riddled New Mexico does, or impose on them a cash deposit high enough to induce their buyers to return them to the liquor stores or induce everyone else to pick them up and return them for the deposits.
Instead of a “nickel a nip" a dollar a nip might work beautifully.
But while the liquor stores use the “nickel a nip" program to pose as civic-minded, they don't really want to reduce the litter they cause. They complain that their taking the empty nip bottles back and refunding deposits would take up too much space in their stores and require too much additional labor. The liquor stores want littering, drunken driving, and underage drinking to remain profitable for them but costly for society.
Cafero says it would be unfair to change anything about nips because liquor store owners got into their business on the presumption they could sell the products. But that's a rationalization for prohibiting all changes involving business, changes involving taxes, pollution control, consumer protection, public safety, wages, and protections for labor. No other businesses in Connecticut have such privilege. All other businesses are always subject to new laws that change business conditions.
Besides, Connecticut's liquor industry already enjoys outrageous privilege -- state law establishing minimum prices for alcoholic beverages, a law that protects liquor stores against the ordinary competition all other businesses face.
The law against price competition in liquor long has given Connecticut some of the highest liquor prices in the country. It is essentially a tax whose revenue goes not to state government but to the liquor stores and wholesalers themselves.
Why does Connecticut allow such exploitation of the public?
It's all special-interest politics.
Most legislative districts have a dozen or more liquor stores profiting from this exploitation and the stores have an active trade association. With Cafero the liquor stores have hired a former legislative leader, and, if their privileges are ever threatened, store owners and their employees will show up at hearings or rallies to intimidate legislators.
Meanwhile, news organizations, in financial decline, won't investigate and report the sordid details of the liquor business in Connecticut lest they risk losing liquor advertising, and the public, ever more impoverished by inflation and other failing government policies, seems increasingly content just to drink itself silly at home or, worse, on the road.
All this littering, drunken driving, and underage drinking should be worth a lot more to state government than $19 million in four years, or less than $4 million per year. Its cost is much higher than that and it's nothing to celebrate.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Chris Powell: Of teachers’ salaries, per-student parenting and generational poverty in Connecticut
Fancy Staples High School, in rich Westport, Conn.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Will Connecticut ever realize that two of what it professes to be its highest ideals of public policy, local control and equality of opportunity, are contradictions?
State government was reminded of this again the other day by another report
Connecticut's teacher pension system perpetuates inequity in student tes...
from the Equable Institute, a nonprofit organization that seeks to improve government employee pensions. Connecticut's state teacher- retirement system, the institute notes, does much better by teachers in wealthy municipalities than those in poor ones, because teacher pensions are calculated from their salaries. Wealthy municipalities pay more so their teachers get bigger pensions.
Indeed, Equable says state government pays twice as much for the pensions of teachers in some wealthy municipalities than it pays for the pensions of teachers in some poor ones.
Additionally, because of the higher salaries they pay, wealthy municipalities suffer less turnover in their teaching staffs and retain better teachers longer than poor municipalities do.
Equable says the disparity in pension contributions is responsible for some of the disparity in student performance between wealthy and poor municipalities. That stands to reason, but pension disparities surely matter far less to educational results than the disparities in the household wealth of students and the amount of parenting they get.
As usual, liberals and teachers unions like to attribute all the deficiencies of public education to inadequate spending, even though Connecticut has been raising education spending steadily for almost 50 years, improving teacher salaries and pensions without improving student performance.
Per-pupil parenting has always been the main determinant of student performance, but politics prohibits addressing the parenting problem. No elected official or candidate dares to note the strong correlation between single-parent households and child neglect and abuse, student educational failure, poor physical and mental health, and general misbehavior. Acknowledging that correlation would impugn the entire welfare system and the perverse incentives it gives the poor, and it would show where so much social disintegration is coming from.
But everyone admires teachers as individuals, so finding public money for satisfying them and their unions is easy and doesn't cause the political problems that examining the causes of poverty would.
It's no wonder that teachers prefer to teach well-parented, well-behaved, attentive, and curious kids rather than poorly parented, ill-behaved, and indifferent or demoralized kids. It's no wonder that teachers in impoverished cities, like police officers there, can get worn down quickly and seek to pursue their careers in municipalities with less poverty and dysfunction. This is just another aspect of the flight to the suburbs, which has been caused by government's failure to solve poverty in the cities.
Maybe state law should arrange for all teachers to be paid directly by state government according to the same salary schedule so their pensions would be equalized. No adjustments for union contracts or individual merit could be permitted, since they would generate inequality.
Such an egalitarian system likely would reduce salaries and pensions in wealthy and middle-class municipalities and increase them in poor ones. But of course teacher unions would never give up bargaining power over wages and benefits, not in the pursuit of equality or anything else.
Or maybe teachers in the poorest municipalities should be paid at least $100,000 per year more than teachers in the highest-paying municipalities. They might not all be good teachers but most might deserve more money just for having to deal with so many indifferent and misbehaving students.
While that might be fairer to those teachers, who are part of the constituency the Equable Institute is trying to help, Connecticut's long experience would still be that school spending is almost irrelevant to educational performance, and the presumption of increasing teacher salaries and pensions would still be that the job satisfaction of teachers is more important than education itself and ending generational poverty.
But even the long failure to end generational poverty isn't the biggest problem here. The biggest problem here is simply Connecticut's failure to care much about it. As a political matter, paying off the teachers is the most we can do.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Chris Powell: Ex Conn. official’s trial evokes musical comedy
MANCHESTER, Conn.
At his federal trial this month was Konstantinos Diamantis, who once doubled as deputy state budget director and chief of state government's school-construction office, really trying to defend himself against bribery and extortion charges, or was he actually auditioning for a revival of the Broadway musical Fiorello?
The play humorously depicts the crusade against corruption that was waged nearly a century ago by New York City's reformist mayor, Fiorello LaGuardia. Diamantis' explanation of his work in the school-construction office would have fit right in.
According to Diamantis, he wasn't shaking down contractors for kickbacks. No, he was charging them finder's fees for introducing them to people who might be helpful to their companies. The contractors didn't see it that way. Some already had pleaded guilty to paying him the bribes he demanded, understanding the payments as the condition for getting the state construction work.
Diamantis's testimony could have been turned into another verse in “Little Tin Box,” the cleverest song from Fiorello, which consists of courtroom exchanges between a grand jury judge and corrupt city employees testifying before him.
It's surprising that Diamantis's jury needed a day and a half before deciding that his story was suitable for musical comedy and convicting him on all 21 charges. But there won't be much humor in the long prison sentence he's facing.
Lately there has been a lot of sleaze if not outright corruption in state government, the consequence of longstanding one-party rule.
Among other things, the chairwoman of the Public Utilities Regulatory Authority resigned upon being caught lying to the legislature, a court, and the public. Legislators have been caught stuffing expensive “earmarks" into the state budget to benefit nominally nonprofit organizations run by their friends. The former public college system chancellor was dismissed but is getting a year of severance worth nearly $500,000 after being caught abusing his expense account, and he is guaranteed another comfortable public college job when his severance expires.
State government is a big place and some of its denizens will always cheat and steal. While Gov. Ned Lamont is as political as any other governor, he is not corrupt; he sometimes has been badly served by those he trusted.
But it is starting to seem as if Connecticut could use its own Fiorello LaGuardia to run a perpetual grand jury investigating corruption and malfeasance in state government. Federal -- not state -- prosecutors investigated Diamantis, and the General Assembly still refuses to examine government operations, confident that there will always be plenty of money for the little tin box.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Chris Powell: Build housing without sprawl; are schools sanctuaries for illegals?
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Supposedly there was going to be a special session of the Connecticut General Assembly in the fall to arrange a compromise on the housing legislation passed by liberal Democratic legislators during this year's regular session but vetoed by Gov. Ned Lamont. Fall is here but neither the governor nor the legislature has issued such a call. It's not clear what's happening.
But in a commentary the other day the Yankee Institute's Meghan Portfolio argued that a special session would not be good for democracy. “Special sessions often operate in the shadows," she wrote. “Bills frequently don't appear until the very day of the vote, sometimes only hours before. Towns, taxpayers, and even rank-and-file legislators are left in the dark. This isn't policymaking. It's ambush politics."
Indeed, special-session legislation can get written by a few leaders without public participation and review. Only after its enactment are the “rats’’ in the legislation discovered -- provisions that never would have been approved if adequately publicized.
Connecticut's housing shortage is an urgent problem, the biggest factor in the state's outrageously high cost of living. But the thrust of the vetoed legislation -- reducing the obstructive influence of suburban zoning and imposing more rent control -- was never going to get much housing built quickly. Mainly the legislation would have let liberals feel better about themselves even as it made them hypocrites on environmental protection.
Many towns that have used zoning to exclude the middle and lower classes don't have the infrastructure necessary for higher-density housing -- water, sewer, and electrical systems, wide roads, and school capacity.
Of course their exclusive zoning was meant to keep things that way. But tearing up the countryside with more suburban sprawl to spite the bigoted snobs will have more disadvantages than it's worth when there is a much faster and more efficient way to build housing.
Connecticut's cities and inner suburbs are full of abandoned industrial property, decrepit tenements, and vacant or half-empty shopping centers. Many are eyesores. Additionally, much office space in the cities is vacant. All these properties are already served by the necessary infrastructure and redeveloping it as housing would do no environmental damage. Most of their neighbors might be glad if something shiny and new replaced the eyesores.
This is where Connecticut's urgent housing effort should concentrate, and that effort should be managed by a state housing development board, empowered to condemn decrepit or underused properties, take others by eminent domain, and option the properties to developers for market-rate housing, with the options withdrawn if developers fail to make quick progress.
A state whose leaders seem to think that the state government has enough money to buy the Connecticut Sun WNBA basketball team, when the state already has two nationally ranked public university teams, should have no trouble finding the money to build thousands of units of housing in a hurry. Or the state could skip the basketball team purchase and just build the housing instead.
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Governor Lamont is right to want federal immigration agents to stop wearing masks and to start wearing badges and clothing identifying them as government agents when they make arrests. Masked and unidentified and looking like gangsters, the agents invite getting shot or stabbed by their targets or bystanders. Connecticut U.S. Rep. John B. Larson has introduced legislation in Congress to stop the gangsterism.
But the governor recently went far beyond the sensible. He held a press conference with school superintendents to discourage immigration agents from making arrests at schools, though there seem to have been no such arrests in Connecticut. The governor said he wants everyone to “feel safe" in school.
Why should people “feel safe" anywhere in the country if their presence is illegal? Why should immigration law not apply inside a school? If, as the governor, state Atty. Gen. William Tong, and many state legislators keep insisting -- that Connecticut is not a “sanctuary state" -- what would the governor make schools if not a sanctuary?
Of course journalists spared the governor the trouble of explaining. When obvious questions are politically incorrect, they can't be asked.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Chris Powell: Conn. Democrats are over-impressed by college; make it ‘military,’ not ‘defense’
Rotunda at Manchester (Conn.) Community College.
1933 movie
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Surely Connecticut state Rep. Eleni Kavros DeGraw, (D-Avon) doesn't represent the entirety of Connecticut's Democratic Party. But she is evidence of the party's transition from the party of the working class to the party of the arrogant elites.
Kavros DeGraw revealed herself last month with comments at a meeting of a General Assembly committee studying relief for college student debt. The Yankee Institute's Meghan Portfolio reports that Kavros DeGraw said “most important thing is to go to college … to have long-term earning power and to be able to start building generational wealth and to succeed."
Kavros DeGraw added: “If folks aren't going to college and getting the jobs that college educations fill, what jobs are they ending up in? They're ending up in jobs that do not pay them enough. And then they do become, quote, unquote, a burden on everyone else because of the services they might need."
That's not only a mistaken view of the lives of people without college degrees, many of whom make good livings and do jobs vital to society, but also a mistaken view of the lives of people with college degrees, many of whom are in debt and stuck in dead-end jobs after earning degrees of little financial value while many others make great incomes doing little good for society.
The higher education that so impresses Kavros DeGraw is full of such ironies.
Joshua Moon-Johnson, the new president of the community colleges in Manchester, Enfield, and Middletown touts his degree in “LQBT studies," which may get his political-correctness ticket punched but won't help him convey much useful learning to students.
Meanwhile, the former chancellor of the Connecticut Colleges and Universities System, Terrence Cheng, now a “strategic adviser" to the system's Board of Regents, which pushed him out of the chancellorship because of an expense-account scandal, is even more of a “burden on everyone else," since he is being paid just as much for doing nothing much. Cheng has degrees in English and, not so ironically, fiction.
The Cheng scandal has been continuing for more than a year but Kavros DeGraw seems to have said nothing about that burden on society.
Indeed, many pompous higher-ed types strut around calling each other “doctor” but to replace a lightbulb they have to call someone who knows how to use a ladder.
The problem with college student debt, as state Rep. Tammy Nuccio (R-Tolland) explained to the study committee, is simply that college is overpriced. It costs more than it's worth.
This doesn't mean that college degrees are worthless, nor that all college courses should facilitate entry to lucrative careers. College should not only teach work skills but also broaden appreciation of life in all respects.
But the bigger education problem in Connecticut and throughout the country is lower education. Standards in lower education have been eliminated. Half of high- school graduates never master what used to be considered high school work, and they enter adulthood qualified only for menial jobs.
The drag on society is not the lack of college education but the lack of primary and secondary education, and unfortunately it's too terrifying for elected officials like Kavros DeGraw to acknowledge, so it will get worse.
WAR, NOT DEFENSE: President Trump, who claimed a dubious medical exemption -- bone spurs -- to escape the military draft during the Vietnam War, wants to look tough and to make the country look tougher. Hence his plan to return the Defense Department to its original name, the War Department. Again he is right for the wrong reasons.
The country doesn't need more military toughness as much as it needs more military smarts. Its most recent wars -- Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan -- weren't defense. They were stupid imperial adventures. The country would have been far better off without them.
The same goes for “defense" contractors. They're really military contractors, including Connecticut's home team -- Pratt & Whitney, Electric Boat, and Sikorsky Aircraft. Journalism should stop playing along with the charade.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Chris Powell: Raising Conn. minimum wager is an expression of failure
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Gov. Ned Lamont, Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz, and state Labor Commissioner Dante Bartolomeo last week announced gleefully that Connecticut's minimum wage will increase on Jan. 1 by 3.6%, from $16.35 to $16.94 an hour, being tied by state law to the federal employment cost index. The justifications they offered were not persuasive. Indeed, they were based on false premises.
“Nobody who works full-time should have to live in poverty," the governor said, as if working full-time necessarily has some connection to the monetary value of the work.
All honest work may be honorable, but menial work -- work that can be done by anyone -- is not worth $16.94 an hour if someone can be found to do it for less. The minimum wage is government's idea of what menial work should be worth in an ideal world, an aspiration -- well-meaning in some cases, perhaps, but mostly just government's striking a pose about its own goodness.
The governor's statement about not living in poverty is just liberal blather, especially in Connecticut, as the governor should know well. That $16.94 per hour is $654 a week, even as social-work and economic research groups long have calculated that to live decently in Connecticut a single person needs an income of at least three times as much.
The governor's economic principle about the minimum wage is no more meaningful than everyone else's principle that it shouldn't rain on weekends.
Despite the minimum-wage increase, tens of thousands of people in Connecticut will keep working for pay well above minimum wage while still living in or on the edge of poverty. Part of it will be their own fault, their living beyond their means, and part of it the government's.
Lt. Gov. Bysiewicz did no better. “The minimum wage," she said, “was established to provide a fair, livable baseline of income for those who work." The lieutenant governor's pay, about $190,000 a year, is 5½ times more than Connecticut's new full-time minimum-wage salary, $34,000. If she ever did the numbers seriously, how fair and livable would minimum wage sound to her?
Bysiewicz added, “This is a fair, gradual increase for workers that ensures that as the economy grows, our minimum wage grows with it -- and that's good for everyone."
Except that the economy really isn't growing much at all. What's growing is mainly inflation, the devaluation of the money that workers earn.
At least Commissioner Bartolomeo approached this point. Raising the minimum wage, she said, “helps protect the most vulnerable earners from inflation and cost increases, and helps keeps wage gaps from widening."
Hardly. Inflation long has been underreported by the federal government, with price criteria frequently revised in the hope that people wouldn't believe the evidence of their own lives, the decline in their standard of living. Most of those voting in the last election seem to have stopped believing official inflation data. And even liberals in Connecticut acknowledge that the wage gap keeps widening.
The minimum wage was never meant to be fully supportive for a single person. It functioned as a standard of entry-level pay for the unskilled, especially teenagers, so people wouldn't be too demoralized by their first jobs and would strive to gain skills and advance.
Today in Connecticut the need for a minimum-wage increase is mainly political -- to camouflage the declining skill level of much of the workforce, the fatherless urban underclass -- the increasing numbers of young people who attend schools without standards and graduate uneducated but who, it is hoped, remain full of self-esteem.
Connecticut has tens of thousands of job openings -- for skilled workers -- in manufacturing, nursing, teaching, and other fields, jobs that pay far above minimum wage, for which enough qualified applicants can't be found.
Raising the minimum wage is actually a proclamation that Connecticut has given up on a skilled workforce, a proclamation that the jobs of the state's future will be at the fast-food window -- until the robots take over.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Chris Powell: Yale has gotten too big for its New Haven property-tax break
Yale’s Old Campus at dusk in April 2013.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
If any news report in Connecticut this year should prompt an urgent response from state government, it's the one published last week by the Hearst Connecticut newspapers about the burden of Yale University's property-tax exemption in New Haven.
It's actually an old story but one that has never gotten proper attention from Connecticut governors and state legislators.
The essence of it is that most real estate in New Haven, being owned by nominally nonprofit entities, is exempt from municipal property taxes; that most of this exempt property is owned by Yale; and that the university, while being New Haven's largest employer and the city's main reason for being, is less of a boon than generally thought.
According to the Hearst report, the university's taxable property in New Haven, property used mainly for commercial purposes, has total value of $173 million while its tax-exempt property, used mainly for educational purposes, is valued at around $4.4 billion.
Yale pays the city $5 million annually in taxes on its taxable properties and another $22 million or so in voluntary payments for its exempt properties, or about $27 million. But without its property-tax exemption Yale would owe New Haven as much as $146 million more than the university pays now.
Of course there's no denying Yale's enormous economic contribution to New Haven and its suburbs. Without Yale, New Haven would be Bridgeport, whose reason for being, as long assumed by state government, is mainly to confine Fairfield County's poverty.
But Yale's relationship with New Haven has gotten far beyond disproportionate. As a political force the university is bigger than the city and, it seems, since state government has not acted against that disproportion, bigger than the whole state.
It's not that Yale can't afford to pay more; it has an endowment of around $40 billion, which even President Trump and the Republican majority in Congress have found the courage to begin taxing.
Nine years ago the General Assembly considered legislation to limit the university's tax exemption but did not act.
Yale has claimed that the charter that it received from Connecticut's colonial legislature in the 1700s gives the university permanent exemption from property taxes.
But the charter and its revisions under state law during the next two centuries put limits on Yale's tax exemption, the first limit being a mere 500 pounds sterling. The tax exemption was thought justified in large part because, in its early years, Yale was heavily subsidized by cash from state government and was a de-facto government institution. A remnant of this connection to state government is the continuing “ex-officio" membership of Connecticut's governor and lieutenant governor on the university's Board of Trustees.
Yale no longer gets a direct annual cash stipend from state government but its $173 million tax break is worth a lot more. That money is paid not just by New Haven's residents through their property taxes and rents but by all state taxpayers as well, since New Haven city government is so heavily subsidized by state government.
Even if the courts concluded that the university's charter, as amended over the years, puts it beyond all property taxes on educational buildings, state government could coerce Yale by restricting the acreage it owns in the city, thereby forcing it to sell property and rent it back.
Would Yale leave Connecticut if, as was proposed nine years ago, state law limited university property-tax exemptions to $2 billion per year, thereby raising Yale's annual tax bill by $70 million or so? Yale's huge endowment implies otherwise.
At least the new federal tax on large university endowments has not prompted the richest schools to start planning to leave the country.
The additional property-tax revenue paid by Yale could be divided equally between New Haven and state government, state government recovering its share by reducing its financial aid to the city.
Of course those governments probably wouldn't spend the windfall very well, but it's the principle of the thing.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Chris Powell: Key Conn. Democrats keep pretending they aren’t obstructing ICE
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Some Connecticut Democrats keep doubling down in support of illegal immigration and obstruction of immigration-law enforcement even as they keep pretending they're not doing so.
The other week at the Legislative Office Building about 25 Democratic elected officials held a news conference that made a spectacle of their contradictions.
A week earlier state Rep. Corey Paris (D-Stamford) had issued a warning on social media that federal immigration agents were active in his district. He urged people to “remain vigilant, stay aware of our surroundings, and, above all, prioritize your safety," as well as to bring immigration-enforcement actions to the attention of groups that assist illegal immigrants.
Responding on social media, a conservative organization accused Paris of publicizing the “live location" of immigration agents and urged the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency to “charge him."
ICE reposted the accusation, prompting, according to Paris, lots of anonymous threats against him. He denied disclosing the “live location" of immigration agents and putting any agents at risk.
Indeed, Paris had not posted that agents were, for example, working around the Stamford train station or a particular supermarket. But his district is a small place with defined borders, and citing it conveyed information useful to people seeking to remain in the country illegally, so Paris's intention was clear: to obstruct enforcement of immigration law.
At their news conference, Democratic elected officials, including Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz and U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, minimized that aspect of the controversy. They concentrated on the threats that Paris received, as if there is substantial political disagreement in Connecticut about the impropriety of such threats. (Even Republican state legislators felt obliged to deplore the threats against Paris while failing to deplore what he did.)
No, the substantial political disagreement is about illegal immigration.
“Corey did nothing wrong," Blumenthal insisted, and his colleagues at the news conference repeated this assertion.
All this came just days after Gov. Ned Lamont and state Atty. Gen. William Tong had proclaimed again that Connecticut is not a “sanctuary state" and does not interfere with immigration-law enforcement.
No one in journalism called the governor and the attorney general to ask why, if Connecticut is not a “sanctuary state," a state legislator had just acted as if it is one and if they approved of what he did.
Indeed, in calling their news conference the Democratic elected officials must have been confident that no one in the Capitol press corps would ever question them critically about illegal immigration.
No one asked the Democrats if, by saying Paris did “nothing wrong," they meant that trying to sabotage immigration-law enforcement is OK.
No one asked if they would feel justified in doing what Paris did if they knew that immigration agents were working in a particular area.
No one asked how the explosion in the country's illegal immigrant population in recent years is likely to affect congressional redistricting and which political party will benefit most from it.
No one asked if immigration-law violators who have not been accused or convicted of other offenses should be exempt from enforcement -- that is, if there should be another immigration amnesty.
No one asked if, for the country's protection, every foreigner should get ordinary vetting before being admitted.
And no one asked if, before publicizing immigration enforcement in his district, Paris should have determined whether the agents were going after criminals or just ordinary immigration law violators.
But almost simultaneously with the Democratic news conference,ICE announced that in a recent four-day operation in Connecticut it had arrested 65 people, 29 of whom “had been convicted or charged in the United States with serious crimes, including kidnapping, assault, drug offenses, weapons violations, and sex crimes." Others, ICE said, had criminal records in their native countries.
“Connectiut is a sanctuary no more," ICE said, implying that there would be more enforcement in the state.
How much more enforcement will be required in Connecticut before critical questions are put to public officials who deplore it?
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Chris Powell: Medicaid fraud, kid cuffings, courthouse raid
MANCHESTER, Conn.
When the Republican federal budget and tax legislation was enacted in July, some Democratic officials in Connecticut screamed that it would destroy Medicare and Medicaid, that Republican claims of waste and fraud in those programs were exaggerated, and implied that there is too little waste and fraud in those programs to worry about.
But a few months earlier Gov. Ned Lamont's public health and social-services commissioner retired after it was disclosed that she had countenanced the termination of an audit of Medicaid fraud in a case in which the governor's former deputy budget director and a former Democratic state representative have been indicted and a Bristol doctor has pleaded guilty.
Just hours before the budget and tax legislation was enacted, state prosecutors charged an acupuncturist from Milford with defrauding Medicaid of $123,000.
And a few days ago the owners of a medical laboratory in Branford who were being federally prosecuted agreed to pay $1.2 million to settle Medicaid and Medicare fraud charges.
Necessary as Medicare and Medicaid are, as third-party payment systems they are structured to relieve beneficiaries of any incentive to check the charges incurred on their behalf. Such systems invite fraud and always can use more auditing, especially since the federal government's deficit is out of control and is severely eroding the value of the dollar and thereby reducing the country's living standards.
Elected officials who care about people who need government's help should be clamoring for more serious auditing of all expensive government programs to ensure that the money is well spent. Many Democrats' reflexive defense of the status quo of spending actually hurts the poor.
HANDCUFFS AREN'T THE PROBLEM: Last month elected officials and representatives of the social-services industry joined Governor Lamont at the headquarters of a youth-services organization in Norwalk to celebrate his signing of a law restricting the use of handcuffs by police on children under 14.
The law doesn't entirely forbid handcuffing children; they can still be handcuffed if they are violent or threatening violence or being conveyed to or from confinement.
Just how violent or disorderly do children have to be before police can properly handcuff them? Good luck to police officers in making this judgment and avoiding lawsuits.
Of course police officers are sometimes overbearing even as they are far more sinned against than sinning. The body cameras they increasingly wear and the dashboard cameras that are increasingly placed in their cruisers will help restrain them.
But the problem signified by the new law is not a problem of police misconduct, and the new law against handcuffing children is nothing to celebrate.
The problem is the worsening of juvenile misconduct and the growing number of children who don't know how to behave, one of the many problems that correlate with inadequate parenting. With the handcuffing law state government has decided, in essential Connecticut style, to try to address the symptom of a problem in the hope that no one will note that state government doesn't dare to investigate the problem's causes.
LAW APPLIES IN COURTHOUSES, TOO: Federal immigration agents caused a shocking scene the other day as they raided the state courthouse in Stamford and arrested two men who briefly barricaded themselves in a bathroom. The arrests appalled those people who don't believe that immigration law should be enforced, especially not in a courthouse, though people are routinely detained in courthouses on other charges.
The incident was also shocking to some because federal policy used to avoid arrests in courthouses, but the Trump administration has changed it, realizing that the law applies in courthouses, too, and that courthouses are good places for apprehending immigration-law violators.
Former state Rep. David Michel, D-Stamford, who documents immigration arrests, lamented, “It feels like we're in a state of lawlessness. When I document this, I feel like I'm in another country."
But the lawlessness is the illegal immigration, not arrests for it, and if immigration law is not enforced and all immigrants are not vetted normally, the United States soon may become another country.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Chris Powell: Euphemism can’t erase doubts about sex-change therapy for minors
A young transgender woman before and after two years of hormone-replacement therapy.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Is “gender-affirming care" good or bad?
Whatever it is, it's a euphemism, a term of camouflage to prevent something from being plainly understood and to present it in a favorable light -- in this case to diminish the controversy that would be recognized if the proper neutral, impartial, and descriptive term was used: sex-change therapy.
Since “gender-affirming care" is politically correct and most journalism seeks to be, journalism uses “gender-affirming care" to pretend that there is nothing questionable about it. After all, who could be against “care"?
But of course there are questions about it, and the controversy can't be concealed any longer now that the Trump administration is siding with the politically incorrect side of the issue.
First the Trump administration turned the federal government against transgenderism -- men in women's sports, bathrooms, and prisons -- and now it is using the federal government's enormous power over medical policy to dissuade hospitals from using drugs and surgeries to change the sex of minors.
As a result, Connecticut Children's Medical Center, in Hartford, is getting out of the sex-change therapy business for minors, and Yale New Haven Health is canceling its use of drugs in sex-change therapy for minors while continuing to provide minors with mental- health treatment for gender dysphoria.
Most hysterical about this in Connecticut is state Atty. Gen. William Tong. “This is the next ugly front in the ongoing war on American patients, doctors, nurses, and health care providers," Tong shrieks. “This is about scaring patients from seeking care and scaring doctors from providing care, regardless of who is harmed and the lives that will be lost. It's unconscionably reckless and yet another disturbing intrusion of partisan politics on our private lives and choices."
In Politically Correct World, where the attorney general resides, it's impossible to have a good reason for objecting to drug and surgical treatment for minors with gender dysphoria -- impossible to object because drugs and surgeries can have life-altering and irreversible effects on people who, according to law, are incapable of making such decisions for themselves, incapable of informed consent.
In P.C. World the issue of informed consent simply vanishes amid gender dysphoria, even though many minors who have undergone sex-change therapy have come to regret it, and many, if not most, young people with gender dysphoria seem to outgrow it.
Not only that, but in P.C. World anyone who does object cannot possibly have good intentions and cannot sincerely be concerned about the children who are to be subjected to life-altering drugs and surgeries. No, as the attorney general says, such people are just aiming to “scare" doctors and patients and are "unconscionably reckless."
As for what Tong calls the “disturbing intrusion of partisan politics on our private lives and choices," he hardly objected a few years ago when government was ordering people to submit to inadequately tested vaccines on pain of losing their jobs. Of course, back then those vaccines, like the attorney general himself, were politically correct, though not so much now as harmful side-effects are more recognized.
Like it or not, with government so heavily involved in medicine, politics is heavily involved as well. If you lose an election, the government may change medical policies contrary to your liking. That's democracy for you.
Tong and P.C. World seem not to remember that the party of political correctness lost last year's presidential and congressional elections in part because of its exaltation of transgenderism. But even if, as the attorney general insists, objecting to men in women's sports, bathrooms, and prisons while upholding longstanding protections for minors is fascism, it's a pretty tame version.
Gov. Ned Lamont is less hysterical than the attorney general but not much more thoughtful as he seeks to get his P.C. ticket punched. Responding to the change in federal policy on sex-change therapy, the governor says “In Connecticut we do not turn our backs on kids in need." Then maybe someone else can explain the thousands of Hartford and Bridgeport students recently reported to lack critical “special-education" services.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Chris Powell: Why Trump is squeezing Yale, et al.
In simpler times: Front view of “Yale-College" and the chapel, printed by Daniel Bowen in 1786.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
For many years the ravenous far left in Connecticut has advocated taxing Yale University, in New Haven. Yale's endowment long has been managed spectacularly well and now totals more than $40 billion, the second-largest university endowment in the country, trailing only Harvard's.
Indeed, the popular joke is that Yale is a hedge fund masquerading as a university. The popular resentment is that about 57 percent of real estate in New Haven is exempt from municipal property taxes and most of that exempt property, worth about $3.5 billion, is owned by Yale.
Financial aid from state government and “payments in lieu of taxes" makes up for some of the foregone property-tax revenue but far from all of it. Of course, if Yale's property was fully subject to the city's property tax, the city wouldn't be any better off, given its awful management, but city employees might be able to retire at full pay after only two or three years on the job, since the satisfaction of its employees is city government's highest objective.
Now reform is coming to Yale not because of leftists in Connecticut but, ironically, because of President Trump and the narrow Republican majority in Congress.
Their new federal tax and spending law imposes progressive taxes on college endowments. The biggest endowments, like Yale's, will be taxed at 4 percent a year, and one study estimates that this will clip Yale's for $1.5 billion over five years.
Of course Trump and the Republicans aren't taxing college endowments out of any liberal belief in wealth redistribution. They are taxing the endowments because higher education has become a great engine of the political left and the Democratic Party, which is also why Connecticut state government, a leftist Democratic operation, has declined to tax the endowments of private colleges (Yale's particularly) and has declined to subject private colleges (again, Yale particularly) to municipal property taxes.
The Republicans want to cut higher education down to size politically while the Democrats want to keep it a strong source of patronage and propaganda.
Trump and the Republicans are right for the wrong reasons, but that's better than being wrong. For as the college loan disaster has shown, higher education's importance to the country is grossly overestimated. The country's education problem is lower education, as shown by the few proficiency tests still permitted in elementary, middle, and high schools in Connecticut, and by their disgraceful racial performance gaps.
COWARDLY, UNACCOUNTABLE, PATHETIC: How much more does anyone really need to know about the corruption and incompetence of the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities System than something that was reported a week ago?
The system is still embroiled in the scandal over its departing chancellor, Terrence Cheng, who last year was caught abusing his expense account despite his annual compensation of nearly $500,000. The system's Board of Regents decided he had to go but feared that the contract the board had given him, which extended to next July, might be construed in court to prevent his dismissal. So it was agreed that he would leave the chancellorship on July 1 and become "strategic adviser" to the board for another year, doing amorphous stuff for the same compensation.
An interim chancellor, O. John Maduko, lately administrator of the community college system, has been appointed to serve for a year at a salary estimated at $425,000, not counting fringe benefits.
Fair questions remain about the college system's administration and state legislators continue to criticize it. So a week ago, the Hartford Courant asked for an interview with the chairman of the Board of Regents, Martin Guay. He refused.
How cowardly, unaccountable, and pathetic for the chairman of a major government agency.
Gov. Ned Lamont, a Democrat, who appoints most of the regents, should be embarrassed.
Democratic state legislators should be embarrassed too. They should be emboldened to ask more critical questions of the regents and college administrators generally. Legislators could start with: Is it really impossible to hire a competent, public-spirited administrator for less than a half million dollars per year?
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Chris Powell: Bears more likely to triumph in Conn. than ‘affordable’ housing’
A Black Bear, of the species found in New England.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
With Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont's veto of the wide-ranging housing bill recently passed by the General Assembly, the state’s towns aren't likely to reach the ‘‘fair share" quotas of ‘‘affordable" housing the bill set for them. But the legislature's failure to approve other legislation may ensure that each town ends up with another quota -- a quota of bears.
Confrontations with bears in Connecticut have been increasing rapidly, and according to the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, there were more than 3,000 last year. These included two attacks on people and 67 of what might be called ‘‘bearglaries," in which the hungry creatures broke into people's houses. Bear attacks on livestock are up too.
A few days ago a bear attacked a man as he walked with his dog on his property in North Canaan. He escaped with scratches.
According to the environmental department, Connecticut has far more bear confrontations than neighboring states, though neighboring states are estimated to have more bears than Connecticut's 1,200 or so. Maybe Connecticut has so many more bear confrontations because, except for Rhode Island, Connecticut's neighbors allow bear hunting while Connecticut doesn't.
The increasing conflicts with bears prompted some legislators in the recent session to propose authorizing bear hunting. But the bears have a lobby organization as influential as the government employee unions, and it also frightened the legislators out of protecting the public.
The bear lobby argues that people who put bird feeders in their yards or fail to secure their trash barrels are to blame for the increasing confrontations. Certainly bird feeders and trash barrels are attractions, but as the many “bearglaries" show, removing feeders and securing trash barrels has little deterrent value.
Providing access to bird feeders and trash barrels may actually discourage bears from breaking into houses for food.
In any case, the bears are already rampant in Connecticut and won't be going away on their own. Unmolested and having no natural predators, they will reproduce at an estimated rate of more than two cubs per year per mother. A doubling of the state's bear population every three years seems possible, with the population pushing steadily into the eastern part of the state. As long as Connecticut's feckless policy toward bears is only to shoo them into a neighbor's yard, more confrontations are inevitable, with or without bird feeders and trash cans, and within a decade every town in Connecticut could have a dozen bears as permanent residents.
Unlike housing developers, bears don't observe zoning regulations. So odds are that, if state law doesn't change, bears will be disrupting many suburbs and rural towns long before those towns get their first “affordable" housing.
It's understandable why government employees come first in Connecticut, far ahead of the public interest. They are numerous and politically organized and have their own political party, so politicians are afraid of them. But why do bears have to come second, still far ahead of the public interest?
Unlike taxpayers, bears are not an endangered species. Other states manage to stand up to them. Except for the political timidity of the state's elected officials, why should bears be any more protected in Connecticut than coyotes and poisonous snakes?
WHO NEEDS “BABY BONDS”? A month ago Hartford Mayor Arunam Arulampalam announced he had rounded up an extra $3 million in city funds and various grants for the city's ever-dysfunctional school system.
Aleysha Ortiz wants that money instead. She's the recent graduate of Hartford Public High School who is suing the city because, despite the diploma the school gave her, she was illiterate. She's suing for damages, and last month her lawyers offered to settle for ... $3 million.
If Ortiz wins she'll have invented a great racket for indifferent students and their neglectful parents. Fail to learn in school, say nothing about it publicly until social promotion graduates you, and then sue and cash in for life. By comparison the “baby bonds" about which state government is so proud will be chump change.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Chris Powell: Illegal-immigration backers in Conn. don’t get critical questions
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Immigration-law enforcement agents must be compelled, by congressional action or court order, to identify themselves conspicuously during arrests, to display their badges, and to make prompt public reports identifying the people they have detained, why they have been detained, and where they are being held. A free country cannot allow secret arrests. The necessity of such accountability in government goes back centuries to the Magna Carta.
Democrats in Congress should press this issue instead of simply decrying all immigration-law enforcement. Most of the country will agree, and Republicans in Congress who disagree will risk being exposed as totalitarians.
Police in Connecticut already are obliged by law to follow similar procedure, though they sometimes neglect to report arrests promptly and news organizations fail to notice.
But the greater failure of Connecticut journalism lately involves its reporting of complaints against immigration law enforcement. Reporters can't be blamed when they can't reach or get responses from immigration law enforcers, but they can be blamed when they quote officials, activists, and others in the immigration controversy without posing critical questions.
The recent arrest by immigration agents of a woman as she was driving her children to school in New Haven provoked outrage. Some of it verged on hysteria, like the statement issued by Mayor Justin Elicker.
"To arrest a mother in front of her two young children while taking them to school is simply unconscionable," the mayor said.
So what is the appropriate time to arrest and detain someone with children who is suspected of being in the country illegally? Will such a suspect necessarily cooperate in scheduling her arrest and detention, or might she flee instead? Do New Haven's own police always give notice to the targets of their arrest warrants?
Mayor Elicker wasn't asked.
He continued: "We condemn this deplorable act of family separation and call upon the Trump administration to stop its inhumane approach and cruel tactics."
But don't arrests in New Haven and elsewhere routinely separate people from their children, or are children brought to jail with their parents?
The mayor wasn't asked.
"New Haven," the mayor said, "is a welcoming city for all, and our immigrant neighbors are a part of our New Haven family."
Does New Haven really welcome legal and illegal immigrants, the well-intentioned and the ill-intentioned, and the self-supporting and the dependent alike? Does New Haven distinguish among them, or is that properly the work of immigration authorities? Or should no one do that work and should the nation's borders be opened again?
Mayor Elicker concluded: "New Haven will continue to stand up for our residents and our values, and we will continue fight back with every resource available to us against the Trump administration's reckless immigration policies."
What exactly does "every resource available" mean? Even as the mayor was so upset about that immigration arrest, New Haven's school system was facing a deficit of $16.5 million and was preparing to lay off scores of employees, and the chronic absenteeism rate of its high school students stood at 50 percent.
Since New Haven can hardly take care of itself, how can it afford to be a "sanctuary city," accepting, housing, concealing, and trying to educate unlimited numbers of illegal immigrants? And since state government covers so much of New Haven's expenses, how can Connecticut afford to let the city assume unlimited liabilities like these?
Nor were compelling questions posed the other week amid outrage in Meriden about the immigration agents’ arrest and detention of a city high school student and his father a few days before the boy's graduation.
The two were reported to have been arrested at a scheduled meeting with immigration authorities, so presumably they knew there was something wrong about their presence in the country.
Protesters in Meriden chanted that they want immigration authorities to get out of Connecticut. But wouldn't that leave the borders open again? Is that what the protesters want?
Though they were surrounded by journalists, the protesters were never asked.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many year (CPowell@cox.net).
Chris Powell: Look for places with good parenting
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Anyone asked to guess the 10 best public high schools in Connecticut would probably select some of those chosen by the Internet site Niche, which connects high school graduates with colleges.
Nine of the 10 high schools chosen by Niche are in Westport, New Canaan, Darien, Greenwich, Wilton, Ridgefield, Avon, Farmington, Glastonbury and Norwalk. All but Norwalk are prosperous communities that spend a lot of money on their schools and get good results. The high school in Norwalk cited by Niche is a regional school drawing especially motivated students, many from outside the city.
According to Niche, all 10 of the best public elementary schools in the state are in three of the towns with the best high schools -- Greenwich, New Canaan and Westport -- and nine of the 10 best middle schools are in the towns with the best high schools.
Of course educators will conclude from these rankings that per-pupil spending correlates with student performance -- spending up, education up. This is self-serving and wrong.
For while not everyone in the towns with the supposedly best schools is rich, most people there are at least middle class and most children there have two parents, either living with them or otherwise involved in their lives. Their parents spend time with them. Most know their letters, numbers, and colors when they first arrive in school. They know how to behave. They have some interest in learning. Their attendance is good because their parents see to it.
Most such children are easy to teach -- not because per-pupil spending is high but because per-pupil parenting is.
Of course circumstances are much different in high schools in municipalities with terrible demographics, municipalities with high poverty and low parenting. Here many children live in fatherless homes, homes with only one wage earner and a smattering of welfare benefits, homes over which a stressed, exasperated, and sometimes addicted mother presides. These children get much less attention and many are frequently absent from school.
In New Haven, the city that is always lecturing Connecticut about how to live, high schools have a chronic absenteeism rate of 50 percent, highest in the state. Good luck to teachers and administrators trying to educate children who frequently don't show up and, when they do, often disrupt classes, get into fights, or suffer mental breakdowns, but whose general discipline or expulsion is forbidden.
That's why the Niche school rankings are so misleading.
For schools and teachers play the hands they are dealt by community demographics.
Any school dealt four aces is almost certain to win regardless of its resources and the competence of its staff. Any school dealt mostly jokers will resort to clamoring at the state Capitol for more money, as if the great increase in state financial aid to schools since the Education Enhancement Act was passed in 1986 has made any difference in education results, and as if the clamor for more money isn't just an excuse for ignoring the parenting problem, which seldom can be discussed in polite political company.
Connecticut's best schools are actually the ones that get the best results from the students who are hard to teach -- the students neglected at home -- not those who are easy to teach. Nobody seems to compile such data, perhaps because it would impugn the premise of education in Connecticut -- that only spending and teacher salaries count and educational results are irrelevant.
For many years in Connecticut the only honest justification for raising teacher salaries has been to induce teachers to stick around with the demoralized, indifferent, and misbehaving kids about whom nothing can be done until government finds the courage to restore academic and behavioral standards. These days teachers are given raises mainly to secure labor peace and union support for the Democratic Party.
It's the same with police departments. Cities, where poverty is worst, struggle to keep officers not so much because suburbs often pay better but because, like city teachers, city cops increasingly want to escape the worsening social disintegration and depravity around them.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Chris Powell: Illegal-immigration backers ignore its enormous costs
Net migration rates per 1,000 people in 2023, showing flows to more affluent nations, in blue, from poorer nations.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Last week two groups supporting illegal immigration, Connecticut Voices for Children and the Immigration Research Initiative, issued a report warning that mass deportation of the state's illegal-immigrant population -- estimated at as many as 150,000 people -- would be disastrous for the state's economy and state government. The report claimed that illegal immigrants pay more than $400 million in state taxes each year.
This was at best a dodgy estimate. Many illegal immigrants are children and are not employed. The adults among them cannot work legally and so most of their earnings cannot be tracked. While anyone who spends money in Connecticut is likely to pay sales taxes, the report acknowledges that nearly all illegal immigrants who work in Connecticut hold low-wage jobs.
So what they buy is mainly for subsistence, like food, which is exempt from sales tax.
But the bigger flaw in the report is that it omits anything about the costs of illegal immigration in Connecticut, which are huge and increasing, particularly on account of the state government medical insurance being extended to them and the education of their children, most of whom don't speak English and enter the state's schools without providing any record of their education elsewhere and so need to be laboriously evaluated for placement. These students have exploded expenses in the schools of Connecticut's “sanctuary cities," which in turn seek much more financial support from state government.
In February the Yankee Institute, drawing on estimates from the Federation for American Immigration Reform, contended that illegal immigration costs Connecticut more than $1 billion a year.
Whatever the true cost, that it likely weighs heavily against illegal immigration became clear when Governor Lamont, a supporter of the state's “sanctuary’’ policies, disputed the Yankee Institute estimate even as he conceded to a journalist that he had no idea what illegal immigrants cost state government. The governor referred the journalist to the state budget office, which said it had no idea of the cost either and wasn't going to find out.
That is, advocates and apologists for illegal immigration in Connecticut don't want to know its costs, and, worse, don't want the public to know either.
The report from Connecticut Voices for Children and the Immigration Research Initiative is defective in other ways. It asserts that if Connecticut lacked illegal immigrants it would experience a severe shortage of workers for the low-wage jobs they hold -- especially in construction, restaurants, agriculture, janitorial work, and beauty shops.
This is the cliche that illegal immigrants do jobs citizens won't do, and it is nonsense.
Citizens will do almost any job if wages are high enough and can compete with the welfare benefits available to them. Indeed, the jobs held by illegal immigrants are so poorly paid in large part precisely because illegal immigrants are available to do them without the wage,
benefit and labor protections required for citizens. Raise agricultural salaries enough and even some teachers, charity organization workers, and journalists in Connecticut may be tempted to return to picking shade tobacco as many did as teenagers.
Connecticut is full of low-skilled citizen labor. With its social-promotion policy, public education makes sure of that.
For years the state's manufacturers have lamented that they can't find skilled workers for tens of thousands of openings. Meanwhile, middle-aged single mothers are not working at fast-food drive-through windows because they are so highly skilled. But jobs requiring lesser skills are where young people are supposed to start, not remain as adults.
So Connecticut doesn't need to import more low-skilled workers, especially since the state has failed so badly with its housing supply. The state needs to find ways of raising skills and wages and reducing the cost of living, especially the cost of housing, for its legal residents.
But the report from the apologists for illegal immigration sees the path to prosperity as a matter of legalizing all illegal immigrants, in effect reopening the borders. It didn't work the first time.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Chris Powell: What’s lurking Ahead for Conn.?
MANCHESTER, Conn.
In an interview the other week, Connectitcut Gov. Ned Lamont sounded unenthusiastic about seeking a third term.
He complained that legislators and municipal officials parade through his office asking for goodies at state government expense even as the Trump administration is slashing away at financial aid to Connecticut, punching big holes in state government's finances.
The aid cuts don't seem well-reasoned, or reasoned at all. They may be merely malicious. But having long been persecuted by Democrats, even as Democrats concealed and dissembled about the corruption and incompetence of their own national administration, Trump now can exact enormous revenge.
Just as Democrats long have thrived on the patronage power they invested in the presidency, losing that power is going to hurt.
A national recession and even a worldwide one may be coming, possibly triggered by Trump's leap into tariffs.
As a “sanctuary" state with several sanctimonious “sanctuary" cities, including New Haven, Connecticut may expect special hostility from the Trump administration, especially since the hostility is mutual here, as with the three Yale University professors who recently publicized their departure for Canada and attributed it to their detesting Trump. (Since Yale long has propelled Connecticut toward the looney left, these departures may be a good start.)
Lamont keeps saying he thinks that Connecticut is in good shape, but developments contradict him.
Remarking the other week on the human needs that state government addresses, the governor noted that about 40 percent of the babies born in Connecticut are born to mothers on Medicaid, which, among other groups, provides medical insurance for the indigent. But he didn't grasp the bigger significance of that data.
That is, people who can't support themselves shouldn't be having children -- or else these are people who recently have fallen out of the middle class as times get harder.
Homelessness in Connecticut is rising again along with rents and housing prices, which have been driven up by inflation and state government's failure to clear the way for less-expensive housing.
Connecticut's food pantries are experiencing much heavier demand.
Student proficiency in the state keeps declining as schools graduate illiterates and near-illiterates without prompting concern from many in authority. The failing, insolvent and poorly managed school systems in Hartford and Bridgeport are undergoing financial audits by a state education bureaucracy that seems almost as large, inscrutable, and disconnected as the failing school systems themselves. But the educational results of those school systems are not being audited.
These developments don't suggest that Connecticut is in good shape. They suggest that parts of the state are sliding deeper into poverty and ignorance.
The more that the Trump administration slashes federal financial aid to state government, the more cautious the governor properly becomes about state spending. But the legislators, municipal officials and special interests parading through his office with their hands out still can't imagine financial restraint. They think that state government has a large budget surplus and they want to spend it regardless of whether big cuts in federal aid will have to be covered. But they refuse to see that the surplus is only technical, the flip side of state government's still grossly overcommitted pension funds.
That is, the surplus is really just money borrowed from pension obligations, money that, if spent, will increase the heavy tax burden of the pension funds.
Lamont is often portrayed as a moderate Democrat. But he is moderate only insofar as he fears that overspending will produce state budget deficits and tax increases that will alienate voters. He is firmly part of his party's far left in toleration of illegal immigration, transgenderism, racial preferences and manufacturing and coddling poverty.
Other than the blindly ambitious, who would want to be governor amid what lurks ahead?
Even so, Trump's slashing of federal aid just might be the tonic that Connecticut needs to force audits of everything in state government and compel hard but necessary and ultimately beneficial choices. As long as state government remains a pension and benefit society for its employees -- the only people whom state government guarantees to take care of -- it won't even be trying to serve the public.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Chris Powell: Political correctness flusters response to assault in school; cannibal and gambling updates
Downtown Waterbury, called “The Brass City” in its industrial heyday.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Three principles of Connecticut's political correctness have collided sensationally in Waterbury, where two middle-school students recently assaulted two other students. The victims, twin 13-year-old sisters new to the school, are of Arab descent and wore Muslim hijabs that were ripped off, so the alleged perpetrators, ages 12 and 11, are suspected of religious or ethnic prejudice. That would make the assault a “hate crime," and a political fuss is being made about it.
Children are often cruel and stupid and pick on others simply for being different. So it's just as plausible that the assault was motivated by ordinary cruelty and stupidity rather than any serious animus toward religion or ethnicity. Waterbury police are investigating and maybe they'll find out, though the public may not be told, because of those colliding principles of political correctness.
Those principles are:
1) Perpetrators of “hate crimes" should be more severely punished than perpetrators of ordinary crime because ordinary enforcement of criminal law doesn't demonstrate political correctness.
2) Short of murder, children misbehaving in school shouldn't be charged criminally or even punished at all, just referred to social workers.
3) Crime by juveniles should be handled secretly so there can never be any accountability for them or the government.
The collapse of discipline in public education argues for serious and visible punishment of students who commit assault -- something more ominous than the Waterbury middle-school principal's squishy statement about “respect, inclusivity and kindness," something requiring suspension from school and reparations to the victims.
But in the end little can be done with 11- and 12-year-olds except to watch them grow up. School authorities should be held to account but the ‘‘hate crime" crowd should can its bluster.
CANNIBAL WATCH: Questions posed by Republican state senators to the state Psychiatric Security Review Board about Tyree Smith, the murderer-cannibal whom the board recently paroled have turned out to be good ones.
In response the other week, the board's executive director, Vanessa Cardella, confirmed that despite the heavy supervision the parolee is receiving at the group home where he has been placed -- six state employees or contractors are keeping an eye on him -- he still will have plenty of time to be out and about on his own.
Cardella didn't know how much the supervisors will be paid for working on the parolee's case, but it seems likely to be many thousands of dollars a year.
Most people may not understand the necessity for the murderer-cannibal's parole and its expense. Indeed, they may be shocked and appalled. But they shouldn't blame the board, for it is only following the law, which calls for the perpetrator's release if the board thinks he'll be fine if he adheres to the conditions of his parole, which include medication.
Of course there can be no guarantee. Serious risk to the public will continue, which is why a better outcome would have been to keep the man residing in a comfortable room at the state's high-security mental hospital. This probably would be less expensive as well.
But that better outcome requires changing the law about acquittals by reason of insanity. The law simply shouldn't allow release of murderers before their old age. Republican legislators, a small minority in the General Assembly, should submit such legislation even though the Democratic majority will reject it. For at least then some Democrats may be asked to explain why people should feel good about the outcome of the murderer-cannibal's case.
THE PERFECT TAX: A recent study by the state Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services found that people addicted to gambling constitute less than 2 percent of Connecticut's population but produce more than half the state's sports betting revenue and a fifth of its revenue from all forms of gambling.
While the department sees this as a problem with a huge human cost, elected officials see it as a political solution -- the perfect tax. A tiny and disparaged minority finances a disproportionate share of state government and that human cost is not on state government's books.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).