State budget chief Melissa McCaw quietly made special arrangements to take care of 13 nonunion management employees in her office by giving them raises between 5% and 10% last December, while their counterparts at other executive branch agencies didn’t receive pay hikes and haven’t for years.
For some perspective, let’s revisit last year and the onset of the COVID pandemic. The Board of Estimate and Taxation (BET) (led by Republicans) called for a flat budget for all town departments in the face of unprecedented fiscal uncertainty. BET’s throughout Fairfield County followed suit. Every town department responded with compliance, except one. The Board of Education.
What ensued was a viscous and often personal campaign against Republican BET members. It was accompanied by calls to action by the Greenwich PTA and Superintendent and threats of mass teacher firings. Despite the cacophony, BET Republicans did not waver in their decision. None of what was threatened ever materialized.
Local Democrats on the BET have used the North Mianus School ceiling collapse as a campaign tool to suggest Republicans are callous to school maintenance funding. They want you to think that every school in the district is on the verge of structural collapse.
AFSCME Council 4, one of Connecticut’s largest and most influential public sector unions, took $245,951 in COVID-related employee retention tax credits meant to bolster businesses and organizations that were either forced to close during the pandemic or saw at least a 50 percent decrease in receipts in 2020.
Yet, according to the union’s annual LM2 federal filing, Council 4 saw a $5 million increase in receipts over the course of 2020 and employee pay increased by $1 million from 2019. Union membership remained the same between the two years, as did the number of employees listed on the report.
Major media outlets trumpeted new government data last week showing that 5,800 fully vaccinated Americans had contracted Covid. That may sound like a big number, but it indicates that a vaccinated person’s chances of getting Covid are about one in 11,000. The chances of getting a version any worse than a common cold are even more remote.
A car trip is a bigger threat, to you and others. About 100 Americans are likely to die in car crashes today. The new federal data suggests that either zero or one vaccinated person will die today from Covid.
New York lawmakers passed a lavish $212 billion budget last week, representing a nearly 10 percent increase. The budget creates a $2.1 billion Excluded Workers Fund to provide retroactive benefits to illegal immigrants otherwise ineligible to receive federal CARES Act money or unemployment insurance. Qualified applicants will get checks totaling $15,600; unqualified applicants, those unable to demonstrate that they lost a job to lockdowns, will get $3,200.
Walking down Greenwich Avenue on any weekend, I have heard people speaking French, Russian, Japanese, Italian, Spanish, and English with a British accent. Our Town is a virtual melting pot of diversity.
The US Census provides data showing that Greenwich has become more racially and ethnically diverse over the years, with the minority school population reaching 38% in the latest census.
Major League Baseball’s offices are located in Manhattan and the commissioner, a native of Rome, N.Y., lives in the Empire State. Why is that relevant? Georgia has no-excuse absentee voting by mail, but New York state doesn’t. In neighboring Connecticut only voters who are in the military, ill, absent, disabled, have religious objections or are working at the polls can vote by mail.
Consistency isn’t the goal, the goal is virtue signaling.
Some 125 residents in Marin County, Calif., can expect to begin receiving payments of $1,000 a month starting in May in an experiment providing a “universal basic income,” or UBI, to low-income Americans. The program is similar to one recently completed in Stockton, Calif., but with one major difference: race and sex discrimination. Beneficiaries must be “mothers of color.”
A wave of woke corporatism has been sweeping America, with companies lining up to demand boycotts of Georgia, labeling its new voting law inhumane and an abuse of basic human rights.
Coca-Cola CEO James Quincey called GA's law (SB-202) ‘unacceptable’ and ‘a step backward’.
Meanwhile, a Congressional commission has listed Coca-Cola as a major American company with ties to forced labor camps in Xinjiang province in China, along with Nike, Adidas, Calvin Klein, Campbell’s Soup Company, CostCo, Patagonia and Tommy Hilfiger.
Moreover, last November, The New York Times reported that Coca-Cola was lobbying against congressional legislation targeting companies who engaged with China’s forced labor policies.
March was supposed to be Women’s History Month, but at Yale University this month they were busy erasing it.
Last fall, the university sponsored a convocation to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the admission of the first women undergraduates as well as 150 years of women attending the university’s graduate and professional schools. Members of the first three undergraduate classes contributed their reminiscences in video compilations as well as essays about their experience. So far, so good.
Two of the 141 women who wrote essays asked to keep their submissions anonymous for personal reasons. But when the books were published, the Yale Alumni Association had deleted the names of all the women – without asking the authors’ permission or even warning them of what had been done to their work.
