Chris Powell: Could Feds buy fewer junk bonds and more food for the needy?

Scene in 1933 in Sioux City, Iowa, during The Great Depression

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Connecticut's crazy political left hasn't been completely sidelined by the epidemic-caused suspension of this year's session of the General Assembly. The crazy left was out in force again the other week on Prospect Street in Hartford, driving a caravan of cars past the Executive Residence, honking horns and waving signs calling on Gov. Ned Lamont to release all inmates in the state's prisons to diminish their risk of contracting the virus, the prison environment being crowded.

Yes, the demand was for the release of all prisoners, including those convicted of murder, rape, robbery, and the like -- even the murderers of the Petit family in Cheshire, Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky.

Almost simultaneously with that protest, Florida announced the arrest for murder of a prisoner who had been released early to protect him against contagion. He had been deemed low-risk but now he is accused of killing someone the very day after his release.

Meanwhile the left in Connecticut is silent about the plutocratic nature of the federal "stimulus" legislation, which was supported by the state's members of Congress, all liberal Democrats. Most of the trillions of dollars in relief is not devoted to sustaining the suddenly unemployed and their families or treating the sick but to restoring the value of financial assets, which are owned almost entirely by the rich. The Federal Reserve will even be buying "junk" bonds, the debt obligations of less solvent corporations, thereby protecting them against bankruptcy -- that is, protecting stockholders against losing their equity to the corporation's lenders.

The political right in Connecticut is also silent about the plutocratic nature of the "stimulus" legislation though just a couple of years ago the political right was complaining about the "corporate welfare" that was being portrayed as economic development by the previous state administration.

Meanwhile, what is happening in the country is starting to evoke The Great Depression. With restaurants closed to regular dining, farmers who have been growing food for the restaurant trade can't sell their produce and are dumping it, just as, with schools closed, dairy farmers are dumping milk because that market has disappeared too.

But as this food is being dumped, the newly unemployed are queuing at food banks, as they did last week at one in Danbury, where supplies were exhausted long before everyone in a long line of cars got something. Police had to tell people to turn around.

Could the federal government buy fewer junk bonds and more vegetables and milk and pay trucking companies to deliver it to food banks? While the extra unemployment insurance promised by the "stimulus" legislation -- $600 a week per beneficiary for four months -- should start arriving soon and reduce food insecurity, sending to food banks the food that otherwise would be discarded would make the unemployment insurance money go farther.

From the unemployed to the merely homebound, nearly everybody would like to blame someone or something in government for the country's appalling predicament. The federal government wasn't prepared and neither were state governments, and now they are dealing with it on the fly. But then the people themselves long have tolerated all sorts of nonsense from their government and hardly anyone demanded that it be prepared for an epidemic.

In any case government will never be able to do everything well. It's great at creating and distributing money and pretty good at waging war, if not winning it, but not as good at public health. So when this epidemic ends, don't throw your face masks away.

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