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| Samuel Adams, Journalist, Agitator, Son of Liberty |
Chief Executive Officers of large Connecticut businesses, one eye always focused on the exit signs, have been used to couching their simmering dissatisfactions with Connecticut’s increasingly progressive government in semi-ambiguous terms, so as not unduly to alarm politicians in the state they may exit, or in the states to which the CEOs, like Moses leading towards a new promised land the captives of a stone-deaf Pharaoh, have migrated in a mass exodus.
Such has been the case with almost every large business in
Connecticut that has in the past few decades picked up stakes and moved to some
less tax predatory state. In other cases, large Connecticut home grown
businesses have been swallowed up by out-of-state buyers, the penultimate step
preceding a move by the company – forgive the repetition – to pull up stakes
and “move forward,” as the politicians say, to a less tax predatory environment,
either out of state or overseas.
Not this time. The messaging by Pitney Bowles CEO Marc
Lautenbach admitted of no ambiguity.
We find the following few direct quotes in a top of the fold,
front page story plainly titled “Pitney
Bowes chief executive warns that businesses may leave Connecticut if the state
raises taxes”:
“The chief executive
officer of Pitney Bowes Inc. warned state officials Friday that offices emptied
by the coronavirus pandemic could be vacated permanently if tax and other
policies seen as anti-business prevail.
“’You can tax your
way right out of competitiveness as it relates to businesses,’ CEO Marc
Lautenbach said at an online economic outlook conference organized by the
Connecticut Business & Industry Association. ‘A company like Pitney Bowes
has choices.’…
‘There’s a whole new
set of possibilities [post pandemic] that are open to companies in terms of how
and where work gets done,’ Lautenbach said. ‘That, coupled with what went on
from a fiscal perspective ... [with] the states as well as the federal
government, should be eye-opening to elected officials.’”
Progressives, both
nationally and in-state, have so far shut their eyes to such imprecations.
The much berated
Trump administration had stoked the national economy through a series of tax
cuts and regulation reductions. Before the Coronavirus pandemic hit American
shores and made, in Shakespearian terms, “cowards of us all,” Trump’s business
friendly, pro-free market initiatives had produced both jobs aplenty and refreshing
organic boosts in state’s revenues, this before President Joe Biden was told he
could be a new-age Franklin Delano Roosevelt if he were to give full rein to
progressive forces within his party best represented by socialist Bernie
Sanders of Vermont and progressive sans
culottes such as US Senate leader Chuck Schumer of New York and Speaker of
the US House Nancy Pelosi. With a blink of an eye, the usurper Trump was out,
as were his more successful policies, domestic and foreign.
Both Biden and Connecticut
progressives are now in the midst of declaring “a war on cheap energy” – who
needs energy? -- as well as those woke CEOs who had hoisted progressives into
power by their generous campaign contributions and their sanguine response to
anti-business progressive measures. Some Republicans on the right, seeing the
light, have drawn away from unthinking support of Big Business and are inclined
to allow sanguine CEOs to reap the whirlwind they have sown.
Here in Connecticut, the Republican Party has simply
disappeared as a governing force. It took a while for the Connecticut GOP,
which rarely offered principled resistance to the state’s leftward zeitgeist on
social issues, to fade from view. So called “fiscal conservative and social
liberal” Republicans have now been replaced by Democrat progressives who
lean far to the left on both fiscal and social issues.
In deep blue Connecticut and most of the east coast, there
is no Moses on the right shouting to a pharaonic state “Let my people go.”
And there is a chilly indifference on the right in blue states to a counter social revolution or, better, a restoration of a sound social order that in the past had lifted the United States from borderline poverty to prosperity.
One of the reasons
Republicans in Connecticut can no longer remain fiscally conservative yet
socially progressive is that politics is downstream from culture – meaning it
is the culture that shapes politics and not, as progressives suppose, politics
that shapes culture, a Marxist, Leninist, Stalinist, Fascist notion that, at
the cost of much blood, sweat and tears, was buried in the post-World War II
years and now threatens to rise from its shallow grave.
What Samuel Adams said to those in his
generation who were indifferent to the American experiment in self-government,
independence and liberty remains even truer today: “If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of
servitude than the animating contest of freedom—go from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch
down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you,
and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.”
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