Skip to main content

SEBAC and Lamont Win, State Loses

Orwell

In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act
– George Orwell

The state of Connecticut – read: Governor Ned Lamont, a multi-millionaire Democrat, and the state General Assembly, controlled for the past half century by a Democrat majority – have concluded a “deal” with Connecticut’s State Employees Bargaining Agent Coalition (SEBAC), a consortium of public employee unions.

“The Senate gave final approval Friday to a four-year package of raises for state employees that includes $3,500 in bonuses to help stem a surge in worker retirements,” CTMirror reported as a sodden April was giving way to May flowers. “The Democratic-controlled Senate voted 22-13 along party lines to approve the contracts, which cover about 46,000 workers — the bulk of the state’s workforce.”

Speaking for Democrats in the General Assembly, co-chairwoman of the Appropriations Committee Sen. Cathy Osten of Sprague said, intending no irony, “Today we’re living in a post-COVID world, where employees — and not employers — are ruling the job market,” a sentiment that certainly rings true with respect to public employee/General Assembly relations.

So intimate is the decade-long relationship between the dominant Democrat Party in Connecticut and SEBAC, that one commentator – no need to guess who that might be – has  described SEBAC as Connecticut’s fourth branch of government.

The rule among ruling state Democrats is: Whatever SEBAC wants, SEBAC gets.

Generally, SEBAC wants higher taxes to finance ever increasing salary and benefit boosts. And the boosting continues without reference to the state of Connecticut’s economy -- that is to say, without reference to taxpayer’s ability to pay.

It is very much the fashion these days to attribute Connecticut’s foundering economy to COVID, former President Donald Trump, the nation’s dark angel of death and destruction, the Ukrainian war, a struggle that pits an independent Western-reliant country against the remorseless attacks of once and future Soviet leader Vladimir Putin, or any other convenient scapegoat that has made its way onto the political stage.

But the truth is that Connecticut’s economy is the way it is because the state’s political structure is the way it is. Putin did not twist progressive arms in the state’s General Assembly to convince that august body to accumulate a total debt related to retirement costs, bonding and other debt of $79.5 billion. “Connecticut has highest taxpayer debt in the country, according to report,” Connecticut’s Yankee Institute declared in a September 29, 2021 story. The debt leaves each Connecticut taxpayer with an “overall state debt burden of $62,500.”

It is a burden that majority Democrats, in state and nationally, have been content to pass along to future generations who will not be voting in the upcoming 2022 mid-term elections.

Connecticut is full of “lockboxes” that have been unlocked and emptied by spendthrift  politicians content to pass their bills along to the state’s already overburdened progeny, many of whom are choosing to leave the state rather than shoulder an ever-mounting debt.

Some of the escapees, it should surprise no one, are members of SEBAC.

Chris Powell of the Journal Enquirer rightly suspects that behind the inflation producing federal tax hikes and the money “shared” with states lurks a “political racket” that ought to be obvious to those in Connecticut’s media who have not yet fallen prey to political propaganda. It was George Orwell who reminded us that the most difficult chore in journalism is “to see the thing that lies right under our noses.”

“First,” columnist Powell writes in the Journal Inquirer, “the federal government creates vast new amounts of money to enable spending far beyond anything the national economy and even the world economy produce. This devalues the dollar against goods and services, a devaluation people are seeing as record inflation.

“Then the federal government gives some of this new money to the states, which increase their spending and distribute some of the money to their people, as Connecticut has been doing. In their turn people spend the new money but, amid the record inflation, they will be lucky to come close to maintaining their living standards, even as their politicians claim credit for all this largesse as they campaign.”

Powell calls this obvious imposture “bribing the public with their own money.”

If voters in Connecticut are determined to die the good death by tolerating the obvious imposture rather than yielding to the truth that is now bellowing in their ears, the phrase “They were bribed with their own money” might make a fitting collective epitaph.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Blumenthal Burisma Connection

Steve Hilton , a Fox News commentator who over the weekend had connected some Burisma corruption dots, had this to say about Connecticut U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal’s association with the tangled knot of corruption in Ukraine: “We cross-referenced the Senate co-sponsors of Ed Markey's Ukraine gas bill with the list of Democrats whom Burisma lobbyist, David Leiter, routinely gave money to and found another one -- one of the most sanctimonious of them all, actually -- Sen. Richard Blumenthal."

Powell, the JI, And Economic literacy

Powell, Pesci Substack The Journal Inquirer (JI), one of the last independent newspapers in Connecticut, is now a part of the Hearst Media chain. Hearst has been growing by leaps and bounds in the state during the last decade. At the same time, many newspapers in Connecticut have shrunk in size, the result, some people seem to think, of ad revenue smaller newspapers have lost to internet sites and a declining newspaper reading public. Surviving papers are now seeking to recover the lost revenue by erecting “pay walls.” Like most besieged businesses, newspapers also are attempting to recoup lost revenue through staff reductions, reductions in the size of the product – both candy bars and newspapers are much smaller than they had been in the past – and sell-offs to larger chains that operate according to the social Darwinian principles of monopolistic “red in tooth and claw” giant corporations. The first principle of the successful mega-firm is: Buy out your predator before he swallows

Down The Rabbit Hole, A Book Review

Down the Rabbit Hole How the Culture of Corrections Encourages Crime by Brent McCall & Michael Liebowitz Available at Amazon Price: $12.95/softcover, 337 pages   “ Down the Rabbit Hole: How the Culture of Corrections Encourages Crime ,” a penological eye-opener, is written by two Connecticut prisoners, Brent McCall and Michael Liebowitz. Their book is an analytical work, not merely a page-turner prison drama, and it provides serious answers to the question: Why is reoffending a more likely outcome than rehabilitation in the wake of a prison sentence? The multiple answers to this central question are not at all obvious. Before picking up the book, the reader would be well advised to shed his preconceptions and also slough off the highly misleading claims of prison officials concerning the efficacy of programs developed by dusty old experts who have never had an honest discussion with a real convict. Some of the experts are more convincing cons than the cons, p