With the General Assembly back in session, interest groups like the Connecticut Business and Industry Association and the Connecticut Education Association are on television again with commercials whose objectives are always obscure.
The CBIA proclaims the virtues of a good business climate and more efficient government. The CEA, the state’s largest teacher union, proclaims the virtues of good schools and teachers.
Only anarchists might dispute any of this, and since it’s pretty much the same thing every year, the CBIA may mean only to position itself as the leading representative of business and the CEA as the leading representative of teachers or public employees generally.
The difference is that the CEA lives up to its positioning with political action, endorsing and financing candidates for the state legislature, governor, and Congress — almost always Democrats, the party of public employee unionism — while the CBIA avoids partisanship and thus avoids rendering much political representation to business at all.
Last year the CEA and CBIA went through the entire legislative session with smiles on their faces as Connecticut suffered the biggest tax increase in its history. CEA smiled because its members are paid with tax money. The CBIA affected to be happy because the tax increase supposedly was restoring state government’s solvency. But the tax increase also weakened the state’s business environment, which hadn’t produced any gain in private-sector employment in 20 years, not since the last record state tax increase, in 1991.
The CBIA’s strategy seems to be “to get along, go along” — to accept as permanent the inferior status of business in the state and the dominance of the Democratic Party and the public employee unions and to take whatever crumbs may fall from the Democratic table as a reward for never engaging in political opposition. This strategy may slightly slow the decline of business conditions and win permission for a business representative to comment privately at the state Capitol when the next expansion of government is plotted. But mostly the CBIA just prevents the wealth-producing private sector from being effective politically.
The CBIA may offer its members a good group medical insurance plan, but that’s about all it has to show for itself and all it’s likely to have as long as it refuses to take sides against the architects and beneficiaries of the state’s long decline.
Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.
