Irrelevant politicians

L ast week, two 16-year-olds riding motor scooters a couple of blocks south of downtown Hartford were shot to death from a car. Meanwhile, in a small park nearby, a church group was holding a rally for peace in the city. A few days later a television station found a city resident asking angrily, “Where’s the outrage?�

A better question might be: Where is even the publicity? For the murder of the teenagers turned out to be barely a one-day story throughout most of Connecticut. Forty-eight hours later someone else was shot to death on a Hartford street and quickly faded from public consciousness, too. It was just another week in Hartford.

Meanwhile, not far away in the city, the governor and legislative leaders, amply protected by the state and Capitol police, were negotiating a budget for a state government that by ordinary arithmetic is bankrupt and that, if its unfunded liabilities are counted, is far beyond bankrupt. Both sides in the negotiations are in denial — the governor, a Republican, never having proposed a budget that came close to balancing, and the legislative leaders, Democrats, having belatedly passed a budget that could even pretend to balance only by omitting the state transportation and motor vehicles departments. Most of what the governor and legislative leaders are negotiating is of little importance compared to shootings on city streets.

Of course publicity and outrage are worthwhile only as prerequisites to action, and maybe they are lacking largely because Connecticut’s political leadership offers no solutions and the public has come to consider urban violence to be the natural order of things. Indeed, Connecticut’s leaders well may consider Hartford not a problem at all but a solution in itself, since the city at least concentrates social disintegration and thereby keeps much of it out of the rest of the state. The absence of this disintegration from state government’s agenda is a more serious sort of bankruptcy.

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If the General Assembly had its way, a government that has given up on maintaining order in its capital city would be nagging people about fast food, requiring chain restaurants to post calorie counts on their menus. A bill to that effect has been vetoed by Gov. Rell, who explained that people probably know that “a vegetable salad is healthier and more nutritious than a bacon cheeseburger.� The governor lamented “a growing tendency by some to legislate nearly every aspect of our lives and society, including personal responsibility.�

The calorie count bill was the embodiment of the recent session of the Legislature, which frantically meddled in everyone else’s business so that it might never have to confront its own.

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President Obama proposes to make the Federal Reserve Board the super-regulator of the financial markets. While the worldwide economic collapse resulted largely from the failure of financial regulation, the Fed is the last agency that should get more authority.

For the Fed, by design, is outside the ordinary structure of government and beyond political accountability. Precisely to prevent accountability, Fed board members are given 14-year terms. And lately the Fed has loaned billions of dollars to financial institutions, has secured the loans with doubtful collateral, and has refused to disclose either the institutions or the collateral. Any government agency with such secret power is monstrous and tyrannical.

Instead of giving more power to the Fed, the longstanding financial regulatory agencies that have failed to do their jobs, like the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, should be reconstituted and strengthened.

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.