Chris Powell: ‘Local option’ to do ‘stupid stuff’ in schools is a dodge

Engraving after Pieter Breughel the Elder, 1556. Caption translated from German "Even if the ass travels to school to learn, as a horse he will not return’’.

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Beautiful as Connecticut is in spring, the state will remain a target-rich environment for the political action committee whose formation was reported by the Connecticut Mirror last week: Parents Against Stupid Stuff.

After all, even as Parents Against Stupid Stuff was being announced, the state Senate voted to qualify strikers for unemployment benefits, and Senate President Pro Tem Martin M. Looney, D-New Haven, leader of the extreme left majority in the Senate, thought it was wonderful. "Workers and employers are hardly ever equal in bargaining power," Looney said. "The scales always tilt on the side of the employer, who has greater resources."

But somehow it doesn't work that way when state government is the employer. Even now Mooney and his extreme-left colleagues in the General Assembly are preparing to approve another master contract with the state employee unions that will give the store away, with bonuses on top of raises totaling as much as 15 percent. The state law authorizing state employee union contracts to nullify freedom-of-information law will remain in force, signifying again that the power in state government's labor relations does not rest with management -- that there is no management at all because the government employee unions constitute the Democratic Party's political army.

Parents Against Stupid Stuff has been started by an investment-fund manager from Stamford, Sean Fieler, who says it will focus on issues arising from what is called the "culture war," particularly sexually explicit curriculum material in public schools, participation of transgender athletes in female sports, and critical race theory.

Exactly how much sexually explicit material is being used in the schools and with what age groups isn't clear, in large part because school administrations refuse to come clean about it, as they have refused in recent incidents in Enfield and Hartford.

Transgender interference in Connecticut high-school girls cross-country competition was recently a national scandal, but most people, scared of being called some kind of a "phobe," won't summon the courage to protest it until it hampers the University of Connecticut's women's basketball team.

As for critical race theory, while there is no evidence that it is being taught outside of colleges, lower education in the state is insinuating racial issues into what it calls "social-emotional learning," which is displacing ordinary academic teaching.

So these are fair issues, especially in regard to what is age-appropriate for sexual topics in school. Should kindergarteners and other very young students be getting briefings on transgenderism, as has been alleged and not denied in Hartford? The controversy about Florida's new law restricting sexual topics to Grades 4 and above -- misrepresented as the "Don't Say Gay" law -- arises from leftist demagoguery.

Fieler hopes to raise a million dollars for Parents Against Stupid Stuff to spend criticizing Gov. Ned Lamont for his position on these issues as the governor campaigns for re-election. But Lamont is not really a champion of transgenderism, critical race theory or "social-emotional learning." Rather, he is evasive, wanting to leave those issues to local school boards.

Lamont's likely Republican challenger, Bob Stefanowski, seems not to want to talk about those issues any more than the governor does, though in a radio interview last week, without taking a position on policy, Stefanowski acknowledged transgenderism's unfairness in women's sports.

"Local option" as a policy on human rights is a dodge, and local education in Connecticut is already so full of state mandates that one more won't violate any sacred principle.

For many decades slavery and then racial segregation were "local option" policies. Title IX of the 1972 civil rights act has been construed as prohibiting "local option" in institutional sports and requiring equal opportunity for women. The presumption has been that women must have their own sports programs because men generally are stronger and bigger and most women cannot fully compete with them.

Denying gender differences in physique and letting biological males compete against females in institutional sports, as Connecticut law requires, effectively repeals Title IX. Maybe Parents Against Stupid Stuff can give candidates the courage to acknowledge and do something about this stupidity.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.

Chris Powell: When in doubt punt to avoid irritating public

MANCHESTER, Conn.

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

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

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

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

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

Treatments vs. Vaccines

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Equity’ Isn’t Fair

Government in Connecticut has a funny idea of what it calls "equity.”

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

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

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

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

"Equity" sounds mainly like a way of discouraging questions.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.

Don Pesci: Business and taxes in Conn.

Official portrait of Calvin Coolidge in the White House, by Charles Sydney Hopkinson

"The business of America is business."

-- Calvin Coolidge, president from 1923-1929

Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont likes to talk shop with business people. A Hartford Courant story, “Gov. Ned Lamont tells Connecticut businesses he’s ruling out ‘broad-based’ tax increases,” will not please Democrat progressives in Connecticut who seem fully prepared to eat businessmen and businesswomen for lunch. The large and overbearing contingent of progressives in the state's Democratic Party caucus cannot be satisfied with sentiments such as this: “I’ve been pretty clear. I have no interest in broad-based tax increases,” Lamont told president of the Connecticut Business and Industry Association (CBIA) Chris DiPentima. And, he hastened to add, “Every governor, Republican or Democrat since, or including, Lowell Weicker, has done that and it did not solve the problem.”

The problem is, of course, lavish, continuing, long-term spending -- and consequent increases in taxes. Taxes in Connecticut have been permanent, while cost-cutting measures have been temporary; this is because the force driving spending is more powerful than the force that would, were it applied, reduce long-term costs permanently. If one discharges deficits by reducing such costs, tax increases would be unnecessary. And the prospect of unnecessary tax increases would reduce the influence of – just to pick one snout at the public trough – Connecticut’s imperious public employee unions. But reducing the influence of the state’s public employee unions would deprive Democrats of funds and worker bees they rely upon to win elections.

Lamont was not prepared to tell DiPentima that, during the rest of his first term as governor, he would deploy his considerable resources to remove SEBAC, a union political organization and lobbying group that some have characterized as Connecticut’s fourth branch of government, from collective bargaining with the state on salary and pension contracts. Some have argued that such contracts give union leaders a Keystone pipeline to the wallets of Connecticut taxpayers, in the process shifting from the General Assembly to Connecticut courts control over a taxing authority that belongs constitutionally to the legislative branch of government. Why aren’t state employee salary and benefit packages set unilaterally by the General Assembly, which alone is constitutionally authorized to take in and disperse tax money? (SEBAC, by the way, stands for State Employees Bargaining Agent Coalition.)

One may be certain that this is not a discussion Lamont will be having anytime soon with President Pro Tem of the Senate Martin Looney or Speaker of the House Matt Ritter, neither of whom are disposed to cut off their union related campaign funds to satisfy their less binding constitutional responsibilities.

Over a long period of time in Connecticut, dating possibly from the unlamented Lowell Weicker administration, Machiavellians within the Democratic Party have discovered that it does not matter a whit whether they employ a Big Stick on the backs of business men and women or whether such contributors are induced to open their pockets to Democrats through special preferments; both methods may be deployed at the same time without diminishing campaign contributions from Connecticut’s larger businesses. The Big Stick lashes are generally offset by Big Business preferments – tax carve-outs, low- or no-interest loans, taxpayer money bribes to induce large companies to remain with their necks on the tax butcher-block in Connecticut, an offer they can’t refuse that is usually overridden by some other low-tax, business hungry state.

Former Gov. Dan Malloy’s Office of Policy Management director, Ben Barnes, once asked by a courageous reporter why he wanted to raise taxes on hospitals, replied in the accents of infamous bank robber Willie Sutton when asked why he robbed banks, “Because that's where the money is.”

The state's revenue stream has been swollen by Connecticut-based financial firms, but these firms have wings on their heels and may move, at the drop of a tax hatchet, to other less predatory states. Lamont may have discovered this disposition on the part of financial firms during an occasion pillow conversation with his wife Annie, who is a successful venture capitalist and the moneymaker in the family.

For these reasons, Lamont may be genuinely indisposed to kill the goose laying Connecticut’s golden tax eggs. On the other hand, union leaders, who have twice refused attempted Lamont cutbacks in their court supported salary and benefits contracts, are barking for MORE spending, as always, and the Democrat-dominated General Assembly is barking for MORE taxes, as always.

For now, Lamont has drawn a red line on “broad-based tax increases.” Lamont has a veto power he has not yet promised to deploy on behalf of a beleaguered CBIA or businesses destroyed through governmental edicts. Democrat leaders in the House and Senate know they have majorities nearly large enough to overcome vetoes.

“The game,” as Sherlock Holmes might say, “is afoot.” Pity there is no Coolidge on Connecticut’s political horizon.

Don Pesci is a Vernon-based columnist.