My golf game was interrupted by a fox chasing a squirrel. That little squirrel was not going to be caught.
Eventually, both combatants gave up — and the squirrel hunkered down for a little rest and a bottle of champagne.
At that moment, a hawk, which had been watching from afar, swooped down and grabbed the squirrel.
And so it could have been for Connecticut. As New York City and the Suburban Office Park Known as New Jersey prepared for war, Connecticut was sitting and waiting, prepared to pounce when the moment was right.
In recent days, New Jersey state troopers were massing at the George Washington Bridge, waiting for rush-hour traffic to clear, so that they could storm across and deliver a punishing message to New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine, on the S.S. Battleship New Jersey last week, floated menacingly close to New York City on the Hudson River, vowing to fight to the death to resist paying “tribute” to New York City, in the form of planned “congestion pricing” that would have charged drivers an extra $40 trillion to enter sacred space below 60th Street during daylight hours.
In response to the sound of war drums on the New Jersey shore, Bloomberg had assembled an army of Meter Maids prepared to beat the invaders to death with packets of parking tickets.
Last-second negotiations led by Quaker mediators have put the congestion pricing proposal on hold, but the region was teetering on the edge of war.
Why is it, you might wonder, that Connecticut was not engaged in the border skirmishes, when its commuterswere also in danger of having to choose between feeding their children or driving to Manhattan?
A Secret Document
The answer lies in a secret document prepared by the Connecticut Office of Policy Analysis and War Stuff, which recommended that Connecticut pose as a neutral, while preparing to reap the benefits of New York-New Jersey tensions.
Connecticut has been practicing to be a faux Switzerland kind of a place for decades, establishing exotic colonies in Greenwich and Stamford designed to attract hedge fund managers fearful of violence along the New York-New Jersey border.
Connecticut had planned to declare unilateral disarmament, while secretly prettying itself up to encourage refugees that wave bond portfolios and seek asylum.
Legislation prepared at a secret General Assembly caucus of conservative Democrats and Libertarian-flavored Republicans would have slashed the state income tax to a 2 percent flat rate, done away with the real estate conveyance tax, limited local property taxes to a 3 percent annual increase, dropped the property tax on cars, and allowed grocery stores to sell wine.
The state’s open-space legislation would have been rewritten to encourage the construction of 10,000-square-foot homes, displacing the squirrels and owls, which would have been free to move to war-torn Manhattan, without paying the congestion fee.
In short, while New York and New Jersey were engaged in a desperate war of attrition, Connecticut was designing the ultimate victory by being a safe haven from government theft and regulatory tyranny.
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
