Chris Powell: Military-industrial complex is fine with Conn. delegation

This building in the affluent Hartford suburb of Farmington, Conn., was United Technologies’ headquarters in 2015-2020.

— Photo by Daniel Pennfield

MANCHESTER, Conn

In his farewell address 60 years ago President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned against what he called "unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex." Since he was a military hero, perhaps only Eisenhower could give such a warning during the Cold War without risking denunciation as a Communist.

But Eisenhower's warning has never been heeded, and President Biden, with his defense secretary, is essentially proclaiming the victory of the military-industrial complex. The new secretary is retired Army Gen. Lloyd Austin, who upon leaving the Army a few years ago joined the board of directors of military contractor and Waltham, Mass.-based Raytheon Technologies Corp., which recently acquired Connecticut-based United Technologies Corp. Austin will have to sell Raytheon stock he received for serving on the board. It may net him as much as $1.7 million.

Acknowledging what will be his continuing potential for conflict of interest, Austin pledges to avoid decisions involving Raytheon for a year. But this can't worry Raytheon much about its investment in the general, since the corporation plans to be doing government business a lot longer than that.

With Austin at Defense and former Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen becoming Treasury secretary after receiving at least $7 million in speaking fees from big banks and investment houses in the last three years, the federal government's two most lucrative agencies will have been securely captured by their primary beneficiaries.

With the exception of Sen. Richard Blumenthal, the members of Connecticut's congressional delegation -- all supposed liberals -- are fine with this exploitation. After all, the state is full of investment bankers and military contractors and what's good for them may be considered good for the state. As for the country, that's something else.

Even Blumenthal's concern about Austin probably became a mere quibble. Federal law prohibits military officers from becoming defense secretary until they have been out of uniform for seven years, so Austin needed a waiver from Congress. Such waivers have been granted twice before. Blumenthal said that to uphold the principle of civilian control of the military, he opposed another waiver. But few other members of Congress objected to it, and Blumenthal and those others still had it both ways, voting against the waiver and then voting to appoint Austin once the waiver is granted.

Besides, with the Democrats in full control of the federal government, conflicts of interest and civilian control will barely register against the party's new highest objective in Cabinet appointments -- racial, ethnic and gender diversity. Austin is Black and so meets the decisive qualification.

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PAY AS YOU THROW?: The administration of Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont seems to have determined that state government no longer can make any money by burning trash to generate electricity at the state Materials Innovation and Recycling Authority's facility in the South Meadows section of Hartford. Such generation apparently is now much more expensive than electricity generated from natural gas, and the facility's equipment already needs renovation estimated to cost more than $300 million.

So the authority plans to close the facility by July 2022, turning it into a trash-transfer depot and shipping to out-of-state dumps the trash now being burned. This is not only retrograde environmental policy; it likely will raise costs for the authority's 70 client towns. As a result the authority and the towns are discussing how to reduce their "waste streams" -- possibly by charging residents a fee for every bag of trash collected, a system called "pay as you throw."

There would be some sense to this, since it would cause people to take more responsibility for their trash, the packaging of what they buy, and recycling. But this also would increase the risk of illegal dumping, even as Connecticut's roadsides and city streets are already strewn with trash.

It might be best for state or federal sales taxes or fees to recover in advance the disposal costs of everything sure to wear out, as the state already does with beverage containers and mattresses and used to do with tires.

Government needs to teach people more about the trash issue. But all that roadside litter suggests that many people are unteachable slobs.

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

Chris Powell: Enough of Fotis, please, and cheaper housing needed in suburbs

Fotis Dulos’s police booking photo

For eight months most television evening newscasts and newspaper front pages in Connecticut have highlighted the disappearance of Jennifer Dulos and the suspicion cast on her estranged husband, Fotis. Now Fotis has killed himself and Jennifer remains missing and presumed dead and her body may never be found. Yet the TV newscasts and the newspapers are still full of them. Why?

In the last few days it has been because of the jostling by relatives over the couple's mansion in Farmington. The couple's general estates may be contested as well, not just by relatives but also by bondsmen and even Fotis Dulos's lawyer, Norm Pattis, who imagines the state prosecuting Fotis's estate for murder to oblige the lawyer's wish to clear his late client's name -- or maybe just to keep the lawyer's meter running.

It is hard to see how news organization should consider Connecticut so interested in probate details that are not only without relevance to anything that matters but also without the horror, heartbreak, and prurience that sustained attention to the Dulos case for so long.

While the substantial wealth of the Duloses may have made the case more interesting, Connecticut remains horrifyingly full of domestic violence among people of all economic classes and ethnicities. Several such cases lately have involved illegal immigrants who should have been deported long before they killed their girlfriends or romantic rivals. News organizations pay little attention to seemingly ordinary domestic violence cases, though any of these cases might have more relevance to how Connecticut and the country operate than who ends up with the Dulos mansion.

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For racial and economic class integration, Connecticut needs more inexpensive housing in its suburbs. Rising housing prices may seem great for those who already own their homes but they are bad for society generally, since housing is as much a necessity of life as food and electricity. Rising housing prices are less a sign of prosperity than of worsening economic inequality.

But government's sometimes awful operation of inexpensive housing is often why suburbs want no part of it, as the New Haven Independent inadvertently demonstrated the other day.

The newspaper told how city police officers had gone to a public housing project and bravely subdued a mentally ill man who threatened his wife with a knife and then brandished it at the officers, daring them to kill him. The police could have shot him but managed to disarm him short of that. He was taken by ambulance to a hospital.

It turned out that the man had caused a similar incident with a knife elsewhere in the city last year. In that one it took an hour for the cops to persuade him to put the knife down.

Since the state no longer operates institutions of confinement for the chronically mentally ill, except for those who have already killed someone, people like the chronic case in New Haven increasingly are placed not just in public housing projects and other subsidized units but also in projects meant for the frail elderly. So advocates of putting more such inexpensive housing in the suburbs should explain why anyone should want to live near chronic cases state government fails to handle properly.

One of the heroic cops in New Haven said he hoped that the mentally ill guy would get "the help he needs." It sounds wonderfully humane but that mentally ill guy is a chronic case precisely because "the help he needs" doesn't exist. The help society and his neighbors in New Haven need is protection from him. He'll be back soon.

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