On behalf of the peasants, please keep the light on
“We learned a few things,” Gov. Ned Lamont recently said at a news conference.
Not to be a nag, but, like what?
Lamont was specifically addressing something which he — to an almost unimaginable degree — does not yet understand even though it would be easily explicable to a ninthgrade civics student of moderate intelligence.
He was expressing his Ahab-like conviction that, to get the business sector to enter into government partnerships, Connecticut should loosen (or abandon) its longstanding laws about open public records.
He wants to do more of this kind of thing, even after his partnership with the Dalio Foundation blew up spectacularly in public, partly over the Freedom of Information issue and partly because Ray and Barbara Dalio did not enjoy having their catastrophic personnel screw-up unfold before a chortling public audience.
The lesson Lamont learned from having egg on his face is that he likes eggs, which is not the usual lesson.
He also continues to insist that objections to the
Dalio arrangement were class-based, while using language that makes you think that, of all the national calamities of 2020, the hardest for Ned to bear was the J. Crew bankruptcy.
In that same news session, Lamont characterized the subtext of the pushback as “Corporate board guys dropping dollars on we peasants.”
I can’t claim to speak for all the peasants, but a bunch of us were sitting around the other day after finishing up the haying, which is just murder in this heat. We got to talking about Ned’s remark.
“First of all, shouldn’t it have been ‘on us peasants?’ I reckon it takes the objective case,” said Miriam Bracegirdle.
“You’re darned right,” said Chubby Hornblower, chewing on a long piece of straw, “but the bigger point, to me, is whether a person of wealth should be allowed to buy his way out of a law obeyed by others. It gets back to what Rawls says about a just society.”
Pukey Longbottom pulled his head out of the water bucket and yelled, “Don’t ye be misusing Rawls again, Chubby. You gotta go back to Hobbes. There are no absolute moral or political values, on account of ...”
Well, I won’t bore you with the rest. The point is, the peasants don’t care if rich folks donate money to enhance government functions. They just don’t get why Ned and his friends want to form chimerical government-business monstrosities than can operate in darkness.
The latest move of this sort is the redacting of the rates the administration is paying to the companies that have contracts with the state to provide COVID-19 testing. Reading between the lines, the state doesn’t want the companies to know which ones are getting paid more per test, for obvious reasons.
But meanwhile, we the peasants have a pressing interest in the cost of tests because the Lamont administration suddenly started kicking about the price of ramming sticks up our noses.
Lamont’s chief operating officer Josh Geballe told my public radio colleague Lucy Nalpathanchil why the state has changed its previously stated goal of 100,000 tests per week: “As scientists learn more about the virus and what approaches are most effective to detect it, we have received a lot of new guidance from the CDC ... and learned about what is effective, and not effective. And candidly there is the financial realities of this as well. Testing is not free.”
Whoa.
Way back in March, Congress passed a guarantee of free testing, and though that law turned out to be riddled with loopholes, it was my understanding that federal and state policy leaned (at least theoretically) wholly in the direction of the idea that widespread testing is worth whatever it costs.
That is still very much true. Mass testing is how we’ll catch asymptomatic carriers. Catching them, tracing their contacts and isolating them is how we will save the economy from a second shutdown, which for the business sector would be more devastating than the first one.
This is a situation where you bond if you have no other way to pay for it, and I’m not a big fan of bonded indebtedness. You borrow because the other road could crash the economy.
Before the schools reopen, it would make sense to take one grade and try to test all students. If we tried to test all Connecticut fifthgraders and managed to get 70 to 75 percent of them, we’d have a good sense of the disease’s actual presence in the population, which would allow us to plan and prevent.
The Lamont policy is morass of goalpost-moving. Point at a shell and we’ll see what’s under it. “We have excess capacity and want people to use it.” Let’s try again. Round and round they go. “Testing is not free. We’ll concentrate on vulnerable groups.” One more time. Which shell? That one. “We no longer have a numerical testing target, but your lucky numbers are 9, 17, 46 and 88.”
As a final middle-digit gesture to the peasants last week, Lamont opposed the federal extension of employment benefits because those big fat juicy $600-aweek checks “sometimes discourage work.”
Thanks for the pep talk, Rich Uncle Pennybags!