Governor Malloy’s office has undertaken to coordinate the work of state agency publicists, supposedly to inform the public better about improvements in state government. To some observers this looks like a campaign of political propaganda to help raise the governor’s low approval ratings.
But however it is meant, the governor’s coordination of the publicists may turn out to be a mechanism of accountability. After all, a governor is elected to put his stamp on public administration, not to leave state agencies free to trundle along however they want. And any governor should want the public to know the good things state government is doing and to publicize improvements. For that will push the agencies to get better and to have something to show for themselves.
Of course propaganda can masquerade as news, but it’s for the news media and the political opposition to unmask it. It’s not the governor’s fault that the long economic recession has weakened Connecticut’s news media and that the state’s political opposition, the Republican Party, is so uninspired.
Malloy presents himself as an aggressive administrator, a detail guy with broad interests. Supervising the state agency publicists will be another way for him to supervise the agencies themselves.
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Arizona is too hot in the summer, hotter than Connecticut’s winter is cold, but the Grand Canyon state can’t be accused of being the tool of the public employee unions that Connecticut is. For Arizona is repealing civil service protections for its state employees.
A new law already has designated 6,000 Arizona state employees with big salaries as “at will” employees, and 14,000 more are being offered 5 percent raises to give up their civil service job security. Those employees and all state employees hired after this month will be subject to far more serious management. Their supervisors will have discretion to discipline or dismiss subordinates and award pay raises and bonuses without legislative approval.
Of course the danger is that such serious management will degenerate into personal or political patronage and kickbacks. But then that is already what the civil service in Connecticut and other states dominated by public employee unions has degenerated into.
Connecticut’s public employee unions are the strongest component in the majority party, the Democratic Party, which, controlling state government, has rewarded them with compensation far more generous than what is available in the state’s declining private sector. Thus the party receives kickbacks from the unions through their support in election campaigns. Connecticut’s merit system in hiring is so weak that state agency heads can hire almost anyone, and only then does civil service really apply, since no one can be fired no-how, as the governor recently discovered to his embarrassment with the food stamp fraud committed by dozens of state employees.
Is there no option between the two extremes of policy in government employment, patronage Arizona-style and patronage Connecticut-style? Even if there was, it probably still would require an informed and engaged electorate. But government in Connecticut has far outgrown the civic virtue that is available to manage it in the public interest. For practical purposes Connecticut’s public employee unions are now bigger than the public.
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Who says there’s no more financial law enforcement? The Des Moines Register reports that new federal rules requiring integrity in banking have caused the dismissal of thousands of low-level employees with old and minor criminal records, including Richard Eggers, 68, recently fired from his job in customer service at Wells Fargo Home Mortgage because he was convicted of using a cardboard dime in a pay washing machine 50 years ago.
This mockery is happening under a Democratic national administration, while politically connected swindlers of hundreds of millions of dollars, like MFGlobal’s Jon Corzine, New Jersey’s former Democratic governor and U.S. senator, remain at large.
Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.
