Chris Powell: Conn. public Schools couldn’t meet new home-school standards

MANCHESTER, Conn.

In principle there's nothing wrong with the basics of the home-schooling legislation that got a public hearing before the General Assembly this week. The bill would require people to notify local officials in person when they withdraw their children from public school to home-school them, to bring their home-schooled children to some sort of wellness inspection once a year, and to provide evidence that the children are learning.

But the legislation should prompt howls of ironic laughter.

The legislation has arisen out of the case of an abused girl who was murdered by her family after her abuse and murder were concealed by a claim of home-schooling that fooled the state Department of Children and Families. It's fair to worry that claims of home-schooling can conceal child abuse or worse. 

Unfortunately the howling has to start when one notices that child neglect and abuse in Connecticut are almost infinitely more frequent among children being  public-schooled,  children about whom state and municipal governments seldom do anything.

Thousands of public school students in the state -- almost 20% of them -- are chronically absent from school, but there are no longer any penalties for them or their parents, so the problem endures. In cities the chronic absenteeism rate is closer to 25%. When those children are absent it's not because they are being home-schooled but because their parents are negligent.

A few weeks ago it was reported that Hartford's schools have changed their policy and now accept young children who are not toilet-trained. School staffers were instructed to clean and re-diaper them. This change of policy indicates wholesale child neglect in the city, but no one advocating the new accountability requirements for home-schooling has taken note of it. Nor have the state Education Department and the Department of Children and Families.

Requiring parents of home-schooled kids to produce evidence of learning may be the biggest howler. For Connecticut's public schools have no such requirement for  their own students.  Social promotion is policy throughout the state, with advancement from grade to grade and graduation achieved without having to learn anything except how to stash your cell phone in a Yondr pouch.

Two years ago Hartford's school system was exposed for having graduated a young woman who was illiterate. She is unlikely to have been the only such graduate in Hartford or the rest of the state that year. The city's school superintendent and the state education commissioner promised investigations but no explanation was produced and no state legislator has ever demanded one. 

Indeed, while the failures of public education in Connecticut practically scream for investigation, the General Assembly is deaf to the problem.

Why? 

First, it's because the people who most deserve reprimanding -- neglectful parents -- are among the legislators' own constituents. There are many in nearly every legislator's district. The law should hold them to account. But standards are falling throughout society, and politics in Connecticut lacks the courage to restore them. 

And second, legislators overlook the failures of public education because an examination would discomfort teachers and their unions. Teachers aren't to blame for child neglect and abuse and chronic absenteeism; they see Connecticut's social disintegration most intimately and must play the hands they are dealt. But teachers are  to blame for much of public education's unaccountability -- binding arbitration of union contracts, the secrecy of teacher evaluations, the impossibility of firing inadequate teachers, and hostility to competition in education.

That hostility to competition in education may be the bigger part of the legislative campaign against home-schooling. Legislators know that if they make trouble for home-schooling parents, they will win political points, endorsements, and contributions from teachers and their unions, Connecticut's most influential special interest.

So instead legislators scapegoat the home-schoolers, who probably get far better results with their students than the public schools do. Some proficiency testing could settle the matter but Connecticut practically forbids proficiency testing in public schools, especially at graduation, presumably because the results would be terrifying. Taxpayers mustn't know the results but instead just keep throwing money.

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

Chris Powell: Democrats want to nullify more; parks won’t save cities

Closed-circuit TV cameras like these can be used to take the images scanned by automatic number-plate recognition systems.

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Most Democratic officials in Connecticut insist that theirs is not a "sanctuary state," a state that obstructs enforcement of federal immigration law, even as nearly every week they call for more such obstruction.

The latest scheme of the nullification Democrats is legislation to prevent the use of Connecticut license-plate camera data for immigration-law enforcement in other states. The bill would forbid Connecticut police departments from contracting with license-plate-reader companies without a guarantee that Connecticut data wouldn't be shared with anyone helping to enforce immigration law.

Such a law may please the nullification crowd but it's hard to imagine any guarantee that would be effective and enforceable. An out-of-state police department might give such an assurance, but who from Connecticut would be assigned to monitor how that department shares it?

Besides, federal immigration agents aren't going to arrest any illegal immigrant for having been in Connecticut at any particular time. Illegal immigrants are arrested for being  anywhere  in the country. License-plate reader data are most likely to be used simply to narrow the search for an illegal immigrant, and immigration agents aren't likely to use such data in pursuit of ordinary illegals but mainly in pursuit of illegals suspected of more serious offenses.

The leader of the state Senate's Democratic majority, Bob Duff , of Norwalk, says, "The more you learn, the more concerned you get about these license-plate readers and the trouble they can cause." What "trouble"? That immigration law might be enforced?

Do Duff and other advocates of the legislation really mean to prevent sharing license-plate-reader data even in pursuit of an illegal wanted for murder, rape, or robbery? It seems so. 

Journalism in Connecticut seldom puts serious questions to the immigration-law nullifiers -- nor  any  questions, really -- so mere posturing on the issue usually gets a free ride here. 

How can advocates of the license-plate reader data legislation deny that it will make Connecticut even more of a "sanctuary state"? They won't have to deny it, because they won't be asked.

Many liberals long have scorned suburbs for environmental degradation – for chewing up the countryside with roads, houses, and cars and increasing air pollution via commuting. Yes, the common desire for a little space, peace, and privacy at home comes with a cost.

But now some liberal Democratic groups -- the Center for American Progress, Justice Outside, and Conservation Science Partners -- are lamenting that most members of minority groups live in cities that are "nature-deprived" areas, suffering greater pollution from industry and highways, along with oppressive heat, flooding, and crowding, which, all together, pose greater risks to physical and mental health.

Yes, city life has its disadvantages. But it has its advantages too, like less expensive housing, cultural and entertainment amenities, and public transit. If cities didn't have their advantages, they wouldn't have so many residents.

Of course cities could be nicer. But their main problem isn't being "nature-deprived." In Connecticut the main problems of the cities arise from the poverty of most of their residents, which is a matter of their lack of parenting, education, and job skills. Poverty in Connecticut has been worsened lately by state government's failure to reduce the cost of living by facilitating housing construction and economizing.

The more job skills that people gain, the more likely their incomes are to rise and to enable them to live in areas that are less "nature-deprived." There will be similar results if more housing is built, more businesses locate in the state, and government cuts costs.

Obvious as that may be, it isn't happening in Connecticut, and in any case there is so much more to prosperous, healthy cities than re-integrating them with nature, as the state has a reason to know well. Because of good urban planning a century ago, Bridgeport has 45 parks comprising 1,800 acres and is nicknamed "the Park City" -- but it is also the Connecticut's poorest and most troubled. More nature isn't going to help.

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

Chris Powell: Can Connecticut Democrats rise above identity politics?

Still “Unum”?

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Why are some people Democrats and others Republicans? 

Personal identities have always had something to do with it. Some people inherit party affiliations from parents. Many Democrats come from the working and government classes. Many Republicans come from the propertied and professional classes. 

Ethnicity often has had something to do with it as well. 

Many Irish immigrants to Connecticut became Democrats because Republicans were in charge when the Irish arrived and were often hostile to newcomers. The next wave of immigrants, the Italians, found themselves in a rivalry with the Irish and so many became Republicans. 

Upon their liberation after the Civil War, Blacks became Republicans because Democrats were aligned with the former Slave States. Blacks began migrating to the Democrats in the 1960s, when Republicans took them for granted and Democratic leaders became more aggressive about civil rights and racial equality.

Political culture is involved as well. The anti-Vietnam War movement originated as a largely youthful rebellion in the Democratic Party during a Democratic presidency, and within a few years the party had become not just anti-Vietnam War but also the party of sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll, and perpetual protest. President Richard Nixon exploited the resulting fear of civil disorder and had the Republican Party pose as the representative of the "silent majority," the cultural establishment.

Political correctness is based to a great extent on identity politics, the assignment of the electorate to interest groups based not on public policy but on mere personal characteristics. Democrats see identity politics as a recruiting tool, though it may alienate as many people as it attracts. 

Identity politics was the object of an appeal made this week by the vice chairwoman of Connecticut's Democratic State Central Committee, Vanita Bhalla, who urged people to join one of the state party’s "caucuses."    

"Our caucuses," Bhalla wrote, "are where Democrats come together around shared experiences, organize, and make sure our party reflects the full diversity of Connecticut. They help shape policy conversations, strengthen relationships across communities, and bring new voices into our work at every level. Joining a caucus is a great way to meet like-minded people."

But the 10 Democratic caucuses Bhalla identified actually proclaim insularity and conformity, implying that members of each group think the same and want something for themselves as a special interest rather than something benefiting the public generally. The special interests the Democrats imagine cultivating with caucuses actually may be hard to figure out.

As policy matters, the LGBTQ+ Caucus may want state government to support the claim of transgender people to a right to participate in sports contrary to their biological sex, and to support sex-change surgery for minors. The Women’s Caucus, at least a caucus of Democratic women, may want state law to tolerate late-term abortion. The Black and Hispanic caucuses may want more state financial aid to the municipalities where most Blacks and Hispanics live.

But what do the Asian-American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Caucus, the Disability Caucus, the Immigrant Voters Caucus, the Muslim Caucus, the Small Towns Caucus, and the Veterans Caucus want in public policy that differs from what most other people, or at least most other Democrats, want for everyone?

Do these caucuses ever go beyond the personal-identity interest and approach the national or state interest -- the public interest? Indeed, as these caucuses suggest, is it really possible to approach the public interest only after people are sorted into identity groups? If caucuses are  necessary -- and local Democratic town committees insufficient as forums -- why not organize them according to policy issues instead?

Organizing people by identity groups risks stereotyping and caricaturing people -- the opposite of the "diversity" the caucuses are supposed to reflect. But then "diversity" isn't really the objective. Getting votes is, whatever the cost.

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

Chris Powell: The $45 million Randy Cox case displays Contradiction of Two political Principles in Connecticut

MANCHESTER, Conn.

While there was plenty of negligence in the case of Randy Cox, the man who was paralyzed after his arrest by New Haven police in 2022, the court decision concluding the case's criminal aspects suggests that the negligence really wasn't that of the officers it was blamed on.

Cox had gotten drunk and was holding a bottle of liquor and brandishing a gun he carried illegally as he walked past a street fair, scaring people, one of whom called the cops. They arrested him and put him into a van for transport to the police station. Inside the van he resisted arrest, yelled, kicked, and rolled on the floor before sitting on the van's bench. But the bench had no seatbelts and when the driver stopped hard to avoid a collision, Cox slid head-first to the wall at the front of the passenger compartment, breaking his neck.

Rather than wait for an ambulance, the officer driving the van continued to the station, where other officers didn't believe Cox's protests that he couldn't move. They figured he was just drunk and faking injury, so they manhandled him into a wheelchair and then into a cell before medical help arrived.

Since Cox is Black, New Haven and then the country were filled with shrieks of racism as his catastrophic injury became clear, though most of the officers who handled him after his arrest were also members of minority groups. Mayor Justin Elicker, who is white and whose city is two-thirds minority, was quickly intimidated out of treating the situation honestly. Scapegoats were needed to calm the political controversy. 

Fortunately for the mayor, five officers were soon charged criminally. Two pleaded guilty in plea bargains -- one of them was fired and lost her appeal for reinstatement and the other retired. The remaining three insisted on innocence and this month were more or less vindicated. Superior Court Judge David Zagaja granted them  "accelerated rehabilitation," a probation that dismisses charges, ruling that the officers had not meant to hurt Cox and had not caused his catastrophic injury.

Impartial observers could have seen as much long before now. The city's responsibility for Cox's injury was entirely a matter of the failure to install seatbelts in the prisoner transport van, a failure dating back many years, a failure for which New Haven and its insurance company have paid Cox and his racism-contriving "civil-rights" lawyer $45 million, which, it is hoped, will cover the lifetime care Cox is likely to need. 

While politically correct Connecticut may not be able to acknowledge it, the heavier responsibility here falls on Cox himself. Getting drunk in public is never a good idea. Getting drunk, carrying a gun illegally, and brandishing it at a street fair, scaring people and compelling police to arrest you, is a worse idea. 

Of course no one is paying more for his mistake than Cox himself, but if he had been white and a member of the National Rifle Association, he might not have been forgiven as quickly he was, with the criminal charges against him dropped because of his injury and the mayor, still playing politics, treating him as an innocent who was persecuted by the police.

As for the three officers who now have beaten the criminal charges against them, all were fired but one regained his job through an appeal and the two others continue their appeals. 

Mayor Elicker says he disagrees with the judge's decision to dismiss the charges against the three officers, so presumably he will continue to oppose reinstating the two still appealing. But a fairer resolution would be a settlement reinstating them with less than full back pay in recognition that for three years they have suffered far out of proportion to whatever they did wrong.

All this leaves political liberalism in Connecticut to sort out the wonderful contradiction of its two silliest principles: that minorities are always right, and so are members of government-employee unions.

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

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Chris Powell: Teachers unions ready to take over Connecticut

“Dutch schoolmaster and children” (1662), by Adriaen van Ostade.

MANCHESTER, Conn.

For many years Connecticut's teacher unions ran a discreet political racket. Many of their members would hold teaching jobs in towns adjacent to the towns in which they lived and then seek municipal office in their home towns, particularly office on their local board of education. They were usually elected.

This arrangement -- working in one town, getting elected in another -- would mask a potential conflict of interest, wherein, as municipal officials, these board members would decide on or even negotiate contracts with a local affiliate of the statewide union to which they also belonged via their job in a neighboring town. Were board members most loyal to the public interest or to their union interest?

Since the connection of school board members to the union whose members get most money spent by school boards was seldom reported by news organizations, the question of primary loyalty was not posed in public forums. If it had been posed, it might have elicited a claim that the public interest and the union interest were identical. That might have been an interesting discussion.

The teacher unions racket is no longer discreet. For the Yankee Institute's Meghan Portfolio reported the other day that the state's largest teacher union, the Connecticut Education Association, now celebrates the racket. The union's December newsletter proclaims that in November's municipal elections 57 CEA members won elections in more than 45 towns, with only five of the union's candidates losing.

The CEA newsletter, Portfolio writes, “makes clear this was no spontaneous wave of civic participation. Candidates were guided through a union-run pipeline, including a formal questionnaire process and participation in the National Education Association's ‘See Educators Run' program."

The union threw its resources into its members' campaigns with e-mails, text messages, flyers, telephone calls, and door-to-door canvassing. Since name recognition and personal contact are the main deciders of most municipal elections, such electioneering is usually successful, especially since news coverage of school board elections, always skimpy, has vanished.

Indeed, the CEA may already have figured out that with just a little more effort it can gain control of every school board and town council in the state before people realize what is going on, there being no one left to tell them.

Of course this is only democratic politics in the era of local journalism's demise. Even people with the worst potential conflicts of interest have the right to run for public office, and special interests with access to big money, especially money derived from government, heavily influence if not control all sorts of political nominations and elections everywhere, though this is most pronounced with teacher unions’ power in the Democratic Party. Teacher union members typically constitute 10 percent of the party's national convention delegates.

But the special-interest influence in politics and government may be worst with teacher unions, since education is the prerequisite of democracy. Destroy education and you destroy democracy, and the trends in American education are terrible. Enrollments, student proficiency, and accountability are falling even as school costs keep rising, and civic engagement is collapsing along with journalism and literacy generally. 

This is the perfect environment for special-interest control of government. No wonder the CEA, special interest No. 1, is celebrating. 

College-student-loan debt remains a huge problem, so people may have welcomed the announcement last week that Connecticut's Student Loan Reimbursement Program has begun accepting applications for reimbursement of college student loan payments made in 2025. 

Reimbursement of up to $5,000 per year is available to Connecticut residents who earned a degree in the state and are making $125,000 a year or less.

This isn't fair. It's really a bailout for the failure of higher education, which is grossly overpriced, long having awarded degrees of little use in making a living and having stuck its victims with debt that seriously impairs their lives or that, as with Connecticut's reimbursement program, is transferred to taxpayers, many of whom did not attend college or paid their own way.

It's another part of the education racket.

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

Chris Powell: Bribing Conn. voters won’t lessen poverty

Demonstration in Washington, D.C.

- Photo by Djembayz

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont's address this week welcoming the General Assembly back to work was reminiscent of the old lament about election years -- that people in a democracy are easily bribed with their own money. 

Such a bribe was the highlight of the governor's remarks -- his proposal to issue “tax rebates," $200 for single people, $400 for married couples. Meanwhile people around the state, most of them associated with the governor's own party, are clamoring for state government to appropriate more money for social needs state government still neglects. 

Many of those needs are more compelling than the needs or wants of many of the people who will receive those “tax rebates." But who will be candid about the incongruity? 

That is, the “tax rebates" are needed most to help re-elect the regime so that it can hold power for another four years in the name of addressing all those unmet social needs, though those needs seem only to increase as more is spent in the name of alleviating them. Seldom are any problems actually  solved.

The governor's address inadvertently acknowledged that poverty has been worsening in Connecticut during his administration. 

Once upon a time in Connecticut most parents could feed their children before sending them to school. Indeed, once upon a time most children in Connecticut had two parents. Now many children in Connecticut -- most children in the cities -- have only one parent, if that, and many arrive at school unfed and distracted by hunger. It's a big problem. So the governor would have all public schools provide free breakfasts.

Not long ago most working people in Connecticut had jobs requiring a skill level, and their compensation included adequate employer-sponsored medical insurance. Not anymore. Today many young people in Connecticut graduate from high school largely uneducated and qualified only for menial work. As a result more adults are working in minimum-wage jobs once considered entry-level. So the governor wants state government to offer a “public option" program of medical insurance for people who don't qualify for Medicaid, insurance for the destitute.

The governor said he will appoint a special commission to study the funding of elementary and high school education. It would have been better to study why poverty is worsening. For everyone in state and local government already knows that funding lower education is always a tug of war between state taxes and municipal property taxes, with most of the money ending up with members of teacher unions, who control most municipal spending by virtue of the binding arbitration of their contracts.

Nearly every legislative session tinkers with school funding formulas without ever improving student performance. Formula tinkering is just the illusion of concern and action, since student performance is not a matter of per-pupil spending at all, but almost entirely a matter of per-pupil  parenting, which can't be discussed though it is at the center of the poverty problem.

The governor noted that Connecticut's high housing prices are impoverishing people who don't own their housing. But he seems to expect far more housing construction than is likely to result from the state's new law restricting municipal zoning. With 169 cities and towns in charge of housing development, there will be little urgency and accountability. What's needed is a state housing development agency to acquire and take control of the sort of vacant or underused city and inner-suburb properties the governor cited in his address, and to contract for middle-income housing to be built on them urgently.

Instead the other day the governor proposed to apply rent control to apartments owned by out-of-state landlords, a demagogic form of expropriation that will inhibit  housing creation.

As most legislative sessions do, the new one will produce a lot more spending, which will be euphemized, as the governor did in his address, as ‘‘investment," a presumption that government spending is always productive. It isn't. After all, as the Lamont administration's most recent scandal has shown, state government lately has “invested" hundreds of thousands of dollars in Hartford Sen. Douglas McCrory's girlfriend.

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

Chris Powell: Conn. governor’s ‘unfinished business’ needn’t wait

Connecticut Capitol, in Hartford. “The Nutmeg State’’ has always been among the richest states.

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Being governor is a tough job, especially in Connecticut, where thousands have their hands out and the more they're given, the more they want and expect. The state has not prospered particularly during Ned Lamont's two terms, but given his party's ravenous constituencies, things probably would be worse under any other Democrat. Lamont has restrained spending and taxes more than the big Democratic majorities in the General Assembly would have liked.

But state government remains poorly managed and in some cases not managed at all, as was suggested by the audit released this week by the state Economic and Community Development Department about corruption in “anti-poverty" grants that the department administered only nominally. The grants were actually controlled by state Sen. Douglas McCrory, D-Hartford, who routed them through a special friend who, the audit found, took a lot of the money for herself in the guise of providing services not actually rendered.

The governor quickly tried to take ownership of the audit, joining in its announcement. He called it “a strong reminder that when taxpayer dollars are involved, we have zero tolerance for fraud, waste, or mismanagement." 

This was nonsense, for such grants have been routinely allocated to Democratic state legislators as raw patronage without oversight or evaluation of results. The governor has gone along with this. The corruption exposed by the audit is a matter of his own indifference and the negligence of his economic development commissioner.

The governor said Senator McCrory should “step back" from Senate business but didn't propose to stop the patronage grants. 

And are Connecticut's cities any less poor for the grants, or less poor for any  “anti-poverty" programs? Is poverty any less of a patronage business?

In a recent interview with the Connecticut Examiner, Lamont said he was glad to answer for his record and, if elected to the third term he seeks, will address “some unfinished business."

Where to begin? And why wait? 

Given the terrible cold descending on the state this weekend, “unfinished business" -- unstarted, really -- could begin with the “cold weather protocol" the governor has invoked. This happens when state government and social-service agencies summon the mentally ill off the streets at night to various overcrowded indoor facilities and send them back outside in the morning in state government's belief that the best therapy for mental illness is fresh air. 

More than a hundred of them have died outdoors in Connecticut in the last year.

For decades this therapy has saved state government millions of dollars on mental hospitals, money spent instead on state employee raises and pensions. 

Always needing urgent review is the Correction Department. Two Fridays ago the General Assembly's Judiciary Committee held a hearing about the department's chronic management failures, starting with the report issued by the state auditors last July showing that 15 of the 18 failures cited by the audit were cited by previous audits as well. The new audit found that the department lately had paid more than $800,000 in salaries for excessive administrative leave.  

Two weeks ago the state inspector general concluded that the deaths of two inmates at the state prison in Newtown within days of each other in 2024 were caused by mistakes with medication administered by medical contractors. This week the department's ombudsman issued a report criticizing not only inadequate medical care for prisoners, a longstanding issue, but also unsanitary conditions and excessive lockdowns.

The correction commissioner said again that the department aims to do better, so that will suppress the issue for another year, since nobody cares much about prisoners besides the ombudsman, whose appointment the governor obstructed.

As for state taxes, however well the governor has restrained them, much of that restraint has always been achieved by pushing what probably should be state expenses down to the municipal level, where they are recovered through higher property taxes, though Connecticut's property taxes are disgracefully high. 

For many years that too has been “unfinished business."

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

Chris Powell: Hartford mayor panders to the anti-ICE mob

MANCHESTER, Conn.

If the country is in big trouble, it's not just because the president pretends that he has authority to wage war wherever he wants. It's also because the country is full of people who are striving to obstruct immigration-law enforcement, full of people who hallucinate that the government is getting ready to kill them, and full of elected officials who pander to both groups.

Among those officials now is Hartford Mayor Arunan Arulampalam, who last week blamed the president and Immigration and Customs Enforcement for the conflict that occurred during a protest outside the federal building in Hartford, where ICE has an office.

Some protesters went behind the building and blocked the garage exit as two vehicles, presumably operated by ICE agents, were leaving. Video shows at least one protester in front of and leaning on an exiting car. Witnesses say someone, presumably an ICE agent, pepper-sprayed the blockaders and then the two cars made their way out by pushing through the mob, with a protester being knocked over but not injured.

The incident was the protesters' fault, not ICE's, just as the fatal incident in Minneapolis last week was caused by people who also set out to impede an enforcement operation.

At a press conference the day after the Hartford incident, Mayor Arulampalam called it "the direct result of the lawlessness and recklessness of the Trump administration." Oh, sure -- Trump and ICE made those protesters block the garage, and the ICE agents were wrong to try the clear the exit so they could do their work, though they are federal police officers just like FBI agents and impeding them is a federal felony.

With the mayor declaring that the work of the immigration agents is illegitimate, more criminal interference with ICE may be expected in Connecticut, at least until the FBI and local police make some arrests.

This doesn't mean that the fatal shooting of the protester by the ICE agent in Minneapolis was justified, though it may have been. It means that she and her friends were not just protesting peacefully but seeking confrontation and interfering, just like the protesters at the Hartford federal building garage.

This distinction was lost on the people who held other protests in Connecticut last weekend -- and lost on the journalists who interviewed them without posing critical questions.

A protester from Fairfield said, “It feels like it could happen to anyone now," though “it" doesn't seem to have happened to anyone not impeding or caught up in an ICE enforcement operation.

A protester from Stratford concurred, saying, “I don't know who among us is safe," though no one at her protest was attacked either.

Critical questions being out of fashion in journalism in Connecticut, no one seems to have asked the protesters just what, if anything, should be done about the illegal immigration that has overwhelmed the country. But questions should have been prompted by the signs the protesters carried, which called for ICE to be abolished or banished from Connecticut. 

So should there be no immigration law enforcement?

That's the implication of the slogan on many other protest signs: “No human is illegal." But that's a straw man; no one has made such a silly claim. What's illegal is the presence in the country of people who have not been properly admitted after a background check. The sanctimony of this slogan seems to advocate a return to open borders.

ICE needs closer supervision and Congress should require it. As with regular police officers, agents making arrests should always be identified by badges and name tags and should not be masked. As with ordinary arrests, detainees should be promptly identified on public registers so press and public can keep track of them.

But as with regular police officers, ICE agents may be more sinned against than sinning, as they are sometimes assaulted by their desperate targets and protesters. People who impede them are insurrectionists as much as the January 6 rioters at the U.S. Capitol were.

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

Chris Powell: Looking for lessons from happier signs in long-suffering Bridgeport

Skyline of Bridgeport in 2025

— Photo by Quintin Soloviev 

MANCHESTER, Conn.

For decades Bridgeport has been Connecticut's worst concentration camp for the poor, easily defeating Hartford, New Haven, and Waterbury for murders, mayhem, wretched poverty, and depravity. State government has taken the city seriously only in regard to the pluralities it produces for Democrats despite its seemingly eternal wretchedness.

But the other week veteran Bridgeport journalist, author and historian, Lennie Grimaldi, broke on his site, OnlyInBridgeport.com, what he fairly suggested could be Connecticut's story of the year, though it is yet to be told elsewhere. That is, Bridgeport, long considered the state's crime capital, having experienced 50 or more murders per year back in the 1990s, had only three in 2025, far below the year's totals in New Haven (16) and Hartford (11). Other major crimes in the city are down too.

Meanwhile Bridgeport's population is rising again and has surpassed 150,000, securing its status as the state's largest city.

Grimaldi speculates that the improvement results in part from federal and local police action against gangs, improvements in housing projects, and more community engagement by the police. One must hope that it's not just a fluke.

Maybe the city's old geographic advantages are reclaiming some appeal too. It has an excellent harbor and is developing a commercial and residential project there. It's on the Metro-North and Amtrak rail line as well as Interstate 95, only slightly less convenient to New York City than prosperous Stamford but more convenient to New Haven's higher-education and medical institutions. The Hartford HealthCare Amphitheater downtown is a regional draw and a soccer stadium may be built. The city has a university and a community college.

But as with Connecticut's other cities, Bridgeport's overwhelming problem remains its demographics, its concentration of poverty, its lack of a large, self-sufficient middle class that can staff a more competent, less selfish municipal government, a government that remains compromised by excessive Democratic patronage and absentee ballot scandals. 

And then, of course, there are the thousands of fatherless children in the city's schools, many of them virtually illiterate and demoralized because of neglect at home. State government finally has taken note of the dysfunction of Bridgeport's school system and is intervening somewhat, if not enough. But education will always be mostly a matter of parenting. 

While the city's property taxes remain nearly the highest in the state, property taxes are high in all Connecticut's cities, in large part because of state government's refusal to let cities control labor costs and its failure to insist on better results for the huge amount of state funding cities receive. 

Mayor Joe Ganim may be doing as well as a mayor in Connecticut can do under urban circumstances. At least he seems to have put his corruption behind him, having been convicted and jailed after his first stint as mayor.

Neither Bridgeport nor Connecticut's other cities can repair themselves on their own. Their futures will be determined mainly by how much the state wants its cities to do more than manufacture poverty while keeping the desperately poor and their pathologies out of the suburbs -- whether the state ever wants to examine and act seriously against the policy causes of poverty, which were operating long before Donald Trump became president.

It should not require a Ph.D. to see that subsidizing childbearing outside marriage with various welfare benefits and then socially promoting fatherless children through school, leaving them uneducated in adulthood and qualified only for menial work, has not led them to self-sufficiency and prosperity but rather to dependence, generational poverty, and mayhem. Only the poverty administrators prosper from such policy.

Indeed, Connecticut seems to think that instead of two parents every child should have a social worker and a probation officer, as well as a "baby bonds" account with the state treasurer's office to ease the burdens to be faced after being raised without two parents.

The “baby bonds" are new but the rest of it is old and just makes poverty worse.

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

Chris Powell: ‘Gender-affirming care’ is a euphemism

Christine Jorgensen (1926-1989)was an American actress, singer and transgender activist. She was the first person to become widely known in the United States for having sex-reassignment surgery. 

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Propaganda is often a matter of names and terminology. For as the Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan observed, if you label something well enough, you don't have to argue with it or about it. The label itself may settle the matter politically.

For many years in politically correct places like Connecticut calling people “racist" has been enough to shut most of them up or defeat a proposed course of action. This racket is starting to fail from overuse in part because indignation about supposed racism has failed to lift up the state's minority population, which remains nearly as poor and segregated as ever even as the people who denounce racism have been running the state for decades.

The propagandistic labeling most in use in Connecticut now involves the Trump administration's proposal to forbid hospitals from using federal Medicare and Medicaid money for sex-change therapy for minors.

“This is not medicine," U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says. “It is malpractice. Sex-rejecting procedures rob children of their futures."

Noting that the administration's action is only a proposal, Connecticut Atty. Gen. William Tong replies: “Gender-affirming care remains legal and protected in Connecticut. Donald Trump is not a doctor, and we're not going to let his cruel political agenda dictate access to healthcare or decimate our hospitals. We are exploring all legal options to protect Connecticut families and our medical providers."

Yes, Trump and Kennedy are not doctors. But then neither is Tong, and many doctors agree with Trump and Kennedy. Indeed, medical opinion increasingly holds that most children will get over their gender dysphoria if they are not locked into it by “puberty blockers," hormone injections, and surgeries. Even people who aren't sure about the best response to gender dysphoria may concede that irreversible treatment is best postponed until children can decide as informed adults.

Contrary to the attorney general's suggestion, the Trump administration has  not  proposed to make gender dysphoria treatment illegal. It has proposed only to prevent life-altering treatments for minors from being federally financed. States could spend their own money on such treatments.

Maybe it will come to that in Connecticut. At least Tong has joined nearly all news organizations in the state in the propaganda war over gender dysphoria. That's what their terminology -- “gender-affirming care" -- is about. 

The neutral and accurately descriptive term here is “sex-change therapy." Calling it “gender-affirming care," as the attorney general and the news organizations do, euphemizes it to presume that there is really no controversy at all, nothing to be questioned -- that the desire of minors to change their sex should automatically be “affirmed" with “care." 

After all, who could be against “care" except people who, as Tong says, have a “cruel political agenda"? People who disagree with him on this issue couldn't be sincerely concerned about troubled children, could they? They must be drooling MAGA freaks, and maybe racist too -- right?

Or else the attorney general is a demagogue and is being sustained by news organizations that prefer politically correct demagoguery to being fair.

NEW HAVEN'S BRAZEN CONTEMPT: New Haven city government's contempt for the public interest in accountable government has gotten more brazen.

A few weeks ago Mayor Justin Elicker, who is also a member of the city's Board of Education, defended the board's decision not to perform a written evaluation of the school superintendent, only an oral one conducted in secret. The mayor said it wouldn't be productive if city residents knew much about how she was doing.

Now, according to the New Haven Independent, the Elicker administration is mocking the public interest again. It is performing written evaluations of city department heads but only insofar as the evaluations say “satisfactory" or “unsatisfactory." There are no specifics.

Should the department heads improve in some way? The public isn't to know or have any way to judge. 

New Haven is proudly the most liberal jurisdiction in the state, and this is what liberalism has come to. 

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

Chris Powell: Asking the able-bodied to work in exchange for state help is reasonable

Official portrait of President Theodore Roosevelt in 1904 by famed painter John Singer Sargent.

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Theodore Roosevelt, who in his time was often considered good liberal authority, noted that the first duty of a citizen is to pull his own weight. Only then, Roosevelt said, can a citizen's surplus strength be of use to society. 

So it is strange that so many people who consider themselves liberals are horrified by the new federal law that sharply limits food subsidies for able-bodied single adults who aren't working. The liberals shriek that new rule may eliminate food subsidies for as many 36,000 people in Connecticut unless they can show they are working at least 80 hours per month.

What's the big deal about that? Eighty hours per month is not even 20 hours per week. Any able-bodied single adult who can't work 20 hours per week to support himself and thereby earn his government food subsidy needs a lot more motivation to stop being a burden on society and to start pulling his own weight.

But government in Connecticut is not in a good position to scold people for shiftlessness when it long has been running up the cost of living -- even putting hidden taxes on residential electricity -- and thereby discouraging those who already may be down on their luck, demoralized, or lacking job skills, as many socially promoted graduates of Connecticut's high schools lack them. 

Indeed, as the state's rising cost of living pushes many people toward poverty and even homelessness, state government should be providing the destitute with more than food -- but in exchange for work. State government should be providing them with emergency, barracks-type housing and jobs with which they can begin to earn their benefits until they can live on their own -- an arrangement like the town farms of old.

The key would be to push people toward self-sufficiency and away from the demoralization that welfare causes and the irresponsibility that leads to welfare dependence. 

Such a system would not solve the problems of the many homeless people who are chronically mentally ill. But at least enough barracks-type housing would allow them to get off the street during cold weather, to bathe and use a toilet, and have a little privacy, a prerequisite of sanity.

As a matter of fairness only state government can take responsibility for those who aren't taking or can't take responsibility for themselves. Municipalities and churches don't have adequate resources for this. 

New Haven particularly is overwhelmed by homeless people, many mentally ill, who, along with their advocates, are pressing city government to open more shelters, which will draw still more homeless and mentally ill people to the city.

One of those advocates was quoted last week as saying it's “immoral" that New Haven “doesn't have a plan to ensure that everyone has a guaranteed right to shelter throughout the winter." Mayor Justin Elicker replied that the city does more for the homeless than any other municipality in the state -- that the city maintains seven shelters and spends $1.5 million per year on the homeless.  

The mayor might have asked: When did New Haven and its taxpayers become responsible for all the region's homeless and mentally ill?

While a homeless man died overnight on the New Haven Green this month, at almost the same time two homeless people died outdoors in Stamford. This is a statewide problem -- an estimated 800 people in Connecticut are living outdoors and 3,000 in shelters, and more than 130 homeless people have died while living outdoors in the state this year. Now that it's cold, shelters usually have to turn people away because they are full.

The homeless and uninstitutionalized mentally ill constitute an emergency. Connecticut needs a government agency to take them all in hand -- to ensure not just that they can get state medical insurance and food but also that they can have a cot in a safe barracks, and that they are required to do some work to cover their expense and accept their responsibility to pull their own weight.

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

Chris Powell: Don’t ask state employees if Connecticut should raise taxes

Hedge-fund mogul Ray Dalio, one of several billionaires living in Greenwich, Conn., long a home for very rich people.

MANCHESTER, Conn.

According to state Sen. Jan Hochadel, D-Meriden, Connecticut shouldn’t be afraid of taxing the wealthy more.

In a newspaper essay the other week Hochadel cited a study done last year by something called A Better Connecticut Institute. The study, the senator wrote, contended that “income taxes play almost no role in where high-earning individuals choose to live," and that “when states raise taxes on top earners, the number of wealthy residents who actually leave is statistically insignificant," only around 2 percent.

“Wealthy people, like everyone else, care about more than their tax bill," Hochadel wrote -- they also care about schools, public services, public safety, economic opportunities, and such.

Well, of course. But no one says that the wealthy care  only  about taxes and not about those other things. They care about many things,  including  taxes. It is a matter of judgment and degree.

Besides, who exactly should be considered wealthy for tax purposes? 

The senator writes of “millionaires," but when retirement savings are added, housing-price inflation has made millionaires of tens of thousands of Connecticut residents who are not close to being plutocrats but still pay a lot in taxes. Millionaires are not as rich as they used to be.

Maybe certain  billionaires  don’t care about Connecticut's income tax, but then why have so many state residents who are not billionaires been moving to Florida and other low-tax states as they near retirement and even before? Why are states that don't tax their residents as much as Connecticut does growing economically and in population even as Connecticut's economy is stagnant and its population might be decreasing if not for the illegal immigration state government encourages?

As Connecticut's illegal immigration from Central America and the Caribbean suggests, migration is not entirely a matter of warmer winters. Those illegal immigrants see more money for themselves where there are colder  winters. Contrary to Hochadel's suggestion, money and people still tend to go where they are treated best.

Liberal Democratic state legislators such as Hochadel have two reasons for framing their desire to increase state government spending as a matter of raising taxes only on the wealthy. 

First is that these legislators can’t make a good case for spending more on the merits of the spending itself, a case that would persuade the less than wealthy. For decades these legislators have been bleating about poverty in Connecticut and appropriating more to alleviate it without reducing poverty at all. Some state government policies plainly perpetuate poverty. No state government seeking to reduce poverty would subsidize childbearing outside marriage and run schools by social promotion as Connecticut does. But ministering to poverty and making it generational provides much political patronage for Democrats.  

Second is that while state government still neglects much human need, liberal Democratic legislators, being the tools of the government-employee unions, don't dare to examine the mismanagement, waste, fraud, and general excess in government, where much money could be saved. Reports in this regard by news organizations and the state auditors almost always pass without comment from liberal Democratic legislators. Most look away even from federal prosecutions of corruption in state government.

Now that Connecticut has become a one-party state, Democrats have become the party of government for its own sake -- not the party of  efficient and effective  government. Hochadel's essay revealed her as an embodiment of this problem.

The organization whose study the senator cited in her essay, A Better Connecticut Institute, consists mainly of government employee unions, and Hochadel herself is an officer of the Connecticut chapter of the American Federation of Teachers.

That is, the institute represents mostly state and municipal government employees, who just happen to be the recipients of most state and municipal government tax revenue. 

Just as you shouldn't ask the barber if you need a haircut, you shouldn't seek advice from government employee unions about whether taxes should be raised so more money can be spent on their members. Bettering Connecticut requires much more than making government employees happy.

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

Chris Powell: In Hartford, a promising way to address the housing shortage

Hartford from the air.

MANCHESTER, Conn.

State government and Hartford city government have figured out the easiest way to solve Connecticut's desperate shortage of inexpensive housing. They just haven't quite realized that they have figured it out.

The solution was presented at City Hall the other week by Mayor Arunan Arulampalam and Gov. Ned Lamont, who announced a $4 million project funded jointly by the state and the city through what is called the Connecticut Home Funds initiative. The project is to turn 18 blighted and abandoned residential properties, condemned by the city long ago, into 20 units of new, owner-occupied housing.

The properties are to be sold to builders for $1 each and the program will help them finance construction. The builders will be required to sell the new houses to people of moderate income at a price that will permit them to be mortgaged for a monthly payment close to the neighborhood's apartment rents. The program aims to increase Hartford's homeownership rate, the lowest in the state at only 23 percent. 

The price control involved, while likely to be popular, may be tricky to manage and is mistaken anyway, since it aims to prevent “gentrification" even as Hartford, terribly poor, needs many more residents with higher incomes. 

The program's selection of builders also may be troublesome since it is likely to be heavily influenced by political patronage. 

But then Connecticut is a one-party state, much in its government is contaminated by patronage, and advocacy of the public interest is so weak here that it's hard to accomplish anything good without patronage.

What is crucial about the Hartford project is its hint that the best way to alleviate the housing shortage isn't to fiddle with zoning regulations and state financial incentives to municipalities but simply to build housing wherever it can  be built without aggravating the neighbors too much.

Hartford is hardly alone in being full of dilapidated and underused properties. Connecticut is pockmarked not just with deteriorating tenements but also vacant former factories and commercial buildings. Many city office buildings are half vacant as well now that so many people work from home via the Internet. 

Most of these properties would be infinitely more beneficial and attractive to their neighborhoods if replaced by  new housing, single- or multi-family, or converted to mixed commercial and residential use -- so much more beneficial and attractive that even the worst snobs might not mind new people moving into town to replace the eyesores. Most of these properties are already served by water, sewer, and utility lines, so housing construction would not chew up the countryside with more suburban sprawl.

But transforming dilapidated and underused properties into the housing that Connecticut needs won't meet the urgency of the moment unless, as Hartford has done, government gains control of the properties and clears the way to their replacement.

No builder or developer wants to spend months or years haggling with a zoning board and pretty-pleasing the neighbors, just as no one who needs housing -- including the children of the very people who object to new housing nearby -- wants to wait months or years for a decent home he can afford.

So addressing the housing shortage with the necessary urgency is a matter of identifying the properties where any housing would be better than leaving the properties as they are. That approach might create more housing in a year than the housing law that Connecticut enacted this year after such controversy.

So an amendment to that law is in order. The law authorizes the state Housing Department to build housing on state government property. The department also should be authorized to condemn and take control of decrepit or abandoned properties  anywhere in the state  and arrange construction of housing there, and to solicit municipalities to recommend such properties for conversion. 

Connecticut has many places where any housing would be better than leaving things as they are. Identify them, level them, build housing on them, and bring housing prices down along with the state's high cost of living.

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

Hartford in 1877.

Chris Powell: Merchants are more honest than Sen. Blumental about debt

In the early 20th Century, the National Consumers League promoted the “Shop Early Campaign". This systematic multi-year publicity campaign used cartoons, letters, editorials, articles and advertisements, sending materials to hundreds of newspapers and retailers across America.

MANCHESTER, Conn.

What would the holidays be in Connecticut without U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal warning his constituents about the perils of the season -- dangerous toys, fraudulent business practices, Republicans, and the like? (Poking the Russian bear on its own doorstep has yet to make the senator's list.)

Last week the senator affected alarm about merchants who advertise products available for purchase with deferred payments -- “buy now, pay later" promotions. People who purchase something by agreeing to pay in the future may find that when the bill comes due that their financial situation has deteriorated. Worse, the senator notes, being late with a deferred payment may trigger penalty interest charges. 

Of course, anyone who has graduated from high school might suspect these risks. But then maybe the senator understands that many Connecticut high-school graduates can't read, write, and do math at a high school or even an elementary-school level. 

In any case the senator overlooks an argument  in favor  of “buy now, pay later" purchases, an argument that members of Congress especially should understand: inflation and the decline of the value of the U.S. dollar and wages paid in dollars. Amid inflation certain goods -- if not worn out, damaged, or perishable -- may actually  increase  in value and, when payment has to be made, may be worth  more  than their original price.

Indeed, Blumenthal misses the great irony in his warning people against deferred-payment schemes: his having been for the last 15 years an enthusiastic supporter of the federal government's own “buy now, pay later" policy. 

For the federal government increasingly finances itself with borrowing, and its total debt now exceeds $38 trillion, an unfathomable number. 

Government debt is not necessarily bad; it can be productive. But this is a matter of degree, and in recent years the federal debt has gone wild, as suggested by the country's recent severe inflation and the heavy burden of federal government interest payments, estimated at about a trillion dollars annually and rising.

Most of this debt is not for long-lasting capital projects that will benefit the country for decades but for ordinary operating expenses and income supports, with the interest requiring payment far into the future by people who never benefited from the debt. 

This is borrowing for current expenses, which used to be considered immoral. But in national politics today, especially among Democrats like Blumenthal, money is believed to be infinite. (Most Republicans know better without acting much better.)

Today in Congress if any Democrat sees a need, actual or merely political, he'll put it into an appropriations bill, and, if he's friendly enough with the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro, she'll put it into the next federal budget with no concern about the federal debt, inflation, or interest burdens.

Members of Congress love this system because it lets them distribute infinite goodies, essential or not, and pay for them indirectly, not with taxes but with inflation, a disguised tax few voters understand or can fix responsibility for.

That's why the merchants promoting deferred payments are actually more honest than the senator who is warning his constituents against them. 

Stick to a merchant's deferred-payment plan and you'll pay only as much as you signed up to pay. But with the federal government, whose costs are increasingly financed by borrowing, debt monetization, and inflation, you pay now, later, and -- since the debt is never actually repaid at all, but just keeps rising -- you pay for the rest of your life as well for what you get or once got from the federal government,  and  for what you didn't get but others get or used to get.

So what's really more dangerous -- the toys Blumenthal is scorning, whose small parts a 2-year-old might pull off and swallow or stick in his nose or ear, or a government that, when the kid turns 18, will welcome him into adulthood largely ignorant and unskilled but, as a taxpayer, already heavily mortgaged?

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

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

IDuke (this edited version: Sting) image

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...

Natasha Sokoloff

The report found a relationship between the state's teacher pension subsidies and district test scores.

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).