Chris Powell: Subsidize social disintegration and blame Walmart
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Some Connecticut state legislators are just wringing their hands and shrugging about the latest court decision in the latest school-funding lawsuit. That may be enough, since state Atty. Gen. George Jepsen is appealing the decision, considering it judicial overreach, and may prevail at the state Supreme Court.
Other legislators express concern that, because of state government's deteriorating finances, any extra state money for failing school systems will have to be taken from successful school systems, terminating the longstanding political consensus that it's OK for state government to put zillions more into failing schools without accomplishing anything as long as appropriations are maintained at current levels for successful schools -- the "hold harmless" policy.
But ending the "hold harmless" policy might be the best thing that Connecticut could do. For change may come only when more people have to start paying more for educational failure.
If, for example, West Hartford, Fairfield, Woodbridge, and Middlebury were told that they must lose millions in state grants so the money can be given to Hartford, Bridgeport, Waterbury and New Haven, where education never improves no matter how much more is spent -- because most city students lack the prerequisite of education – PARENTS -- then Connecticut's focus might start changing.
People then might be less inclined to accept poverty and child neglect as a way of life and a business. People might be more inclined to demand results and accountability from the cities and their residents, and, upon realizing that good results are impossible when policy is only to subsidize social disintegration, they might clamor to change policy so it discouraged rather than fostered child neglect.
Indeed, while that school funding decision, issued by Superior Court Judge Thomas Moukawsher, overreached as a matter of law, it should prompt Connecticut to reconsider far more than school funding. It should prompt Connecticut to reconsider its whole political economy. Apart from subservience to the government employee unions, that political economy consists mainly of three things:
1) State government taxes people who took education seriously, gained work experience, achieved self-sufficiency, lived responsibly and married before having children.
2) State government transfers that money to people who disregarded education, learned little but were advanced from grade to grade and given high school diplomas anyway, and, though uneducated, unskilled, unmarried and incapable of self-sufficiency, had children in the confidence that state government would give them EBT cards, food credits, housing vouchers and medical insurance.
3) And when the "illiterates" -- the judge's candid term -- grow up and can find only menial employment that won't support families, the state's intelligentsia blames Walmart and McDonald's for not paying their employees enough.
A century ago Theodore Roosevelt, while regarded as a flaming liberal, nevertheless argued that the first duty of a citizen is to pull his own weight. The collapse of schools, cities and the state itself is what happens when public policy disagrees.
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MORE REGIONALISM, ANYONE? Last week Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin pitched his plan for more regionalism during an interview on a radio station in New Britain -- the city whose minor-league baseball team Hartford stole last year by promising to build it a $50 million stadium, only to make a mess of construction and prompt litigation that may cost the city a lot more money.
Also last week a court ruled that Hartford must pay $6.3 million in damages for failing to comply with state law on assisting people displaced from their homes, a ruling that came with a contempt finding against the city administration.
Mayor Bronin has yet to explain why anyone else should want to pay for the city's incompetence, nor how there can ever be any accountability if someone else does pay.
Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn., and a long time essayist on political and socio-economic matters.
Chris Powell: Stop honoring the genocidal Andrew Jackson
Manchester, Conn.
Congratulations to Connecticut's Democratic Party for landing Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren as keynote speaker for the party's annual Jefferson-Jackson-Bailey fundraising dinner in June. Unlike the party's presumptive next presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, Warren at least poses as the scourge of Wall Street, though conveniently for Wall Street she also opposes auditing its great enabler, the Federal Reserve.
But another big irony in Warren's appearance should be addressed too. That is, many years ago, possibly to obtain ethnic hiring preferences, Warren claimed Cherokee Indian ancestry, and the “Jackson” of the dinner is President Andrew Jackson, perpetrator of a disgrace of the country's history, the genocide of the Cherokee Indians, the expropriation of their land in the southeastern part of the country, though they were living at peace with their neighbors, and their deadly forced march to wastelands beyond the Mississippi River.
In part because of that disgrace, there is a growing movement to replace Jackson's portrait on the 20-dollar bill with the portrait of a woman, women being unrepresented on U.S. paper currency. The best candidate seems to be Eleanor Roosevelt, the great advocate of human rights, politically incorrect in her time but vindicated by history.
So why keep honoring Jackson at the Connecticut Democratic Party's biggest event? Eleanor Roosevelt's husband, President Franklin Roosevelt, the greatest Democratic president, did far more for the country than Jackson did and could ably replace him as a dinner honoree. (While Roosevelt's internment of U.S. citizens of Japanese descent during World War II was a disgrace too, at least nobody died from it and it was a consequence of war.)
Like the Democratic Party's subservience to Wall Street, Andrew Jackson has become just a bad habit. It would be good if Warren could persuade the party to dump both. At least dumping Jackson won't cost the party any campaign contributions.
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As he seems about to be sent to prison a second time for political corruption, former Gov. John G. Rowland is becoming an ever-easier target for any grievance involving his 9½ years in office, and now the state employee unions are claiming a great if bitter triumph over him in the settlement of their federal lawsuit challenging what turned out to be Rowland's temporary layoff of 2,500 union members amid state budget difficulties in 2003.
The unions call Rowland's action a great crime. But the lawsuit got to the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, where the unions won, only because the state had prevailed at the federal district court level, so it's not as if the state had no case. An appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court might have gone either way, and the unions figured, as did Gov. Dannel Malloy and Atty. Gen. George Jepsen, that the parties would do best to settle rather than go for broke.
While the nominal value of the settlement is said to be $100 million, the attorney general says it has been structured so that most of the money will be paid to the state employees over many years as vacation and personal days off and thus not require special appropriations.
The unions say the settlement's structure demonstrates their generosity amid state government's latest budget difficulties under an infinitely friendlier governor. But the structure seems more like an admission that state employees are not much missed when they don't show up for work, as they didn't show up a few weeks ago on Good Friday, one of their already innumerable paid holidays, which closely followed Martin Luther King Day in January and Washington's Birthday and Lincoln's Birthday in February.
If, as the unions' posturing suggests, state employees spent those days mostly steaming about their oppression, they'll be able to do it again in October on Columbus Day, when, for some reason, Connecticut will honor the destroyer of the Indians of the Caribbean.
Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, based in Manchester, Conn.