An open letter to former Governor John  Rowland

I read in this morning’s paper, 9/27/2016, that you had given up an appeal and turned yourself in to begin your second prison sentence of two and one-half years. What is sad is that at one point you had a bright future possibly on the national level. Perhaps some might even have regarded you as a future statesman.

When one looks at the causes of your downfall, most will probably conclude that your first prison sentence was due to corruption and using state resources for private gain. This second downfall one would conclude was due to violation of federal campaign laws.

However, I feel that your ruin happened for far deeper reasons. I believe that your disgrace came about because of faulty beliefs and assumptions that directed your actions. These actions produced shameful results. What are some of these deceptive assumptions? I can list three although I am sure there are many more:

Government cannot be run as a business. Government and business are two different animals. The purpose of business is to make a profit by producing a product or a service. There is no other reason for a business to exist. If a business does not make a profit it will fail.

According to the Preamble to the United States Constitution the purpose of government is to: “form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity…” there is no other purpose or reason for a government to exist. If a government fails in these endeavors it is considered a failed government or a failed state.

Since it is logically impossible for a government to make a profit unless they do so by raising taxes, it cannot be run as a business or with business practices.

Also, since it is impossible for a business to “form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity…,” it cannot be run on government principles.

An extreme example of a government run according to business principles is the former Soviet Union. Remember collective farms? Five year Plans? We all saw how that worked out.

An extreme example of a business run according to Government values is the mob. The mob promotes values found in government like loyalty, hierarchy and so forth. For an elaboration of these ideas I recommend reading Systems of Survival by Jane Jacobs. I will be happy to send you a copy.

2.      2. Privatize everything:

You are not the first nor will you be the last to advocate privatizing. For example, many states and the federal government are trying to run former state services as a business. One good example is the private prison movement. Over the past several years more and more states have tried to privatize prisons. What have been the results?

States are finding that most private prisons fail at rehabilitation, fail at protecting prisoners from violent imamates and guards and end up being more costly. Results have been so poor that there is a nationwide call for abolishing private prisons. Many prisoners are at the time of this writing, on strike, protesting low wages and accusing the prison system of slave-like practices.

Similarly, private for-profit colleges are closing, leaving students stuck with unpaid loans and no degrees. Corinthian College and Trump University are prime examples.

I could go on and on with many more examples but time does not permit this.

Your advocacy of privatizing the public sector was wrong and outdated. I quote from an article by Aimee Picchi Moneywatch Sept 29, 2016

“Although privatization of public services in the U.S. isn’t new, the government budget crunch that slammed federal, state and municipal agencies following the housing crash has sharply accelerated the move to outsource public services to for-profit entities. As tax receipts across government fell and politics largely blocked efforts to raise revenue, officials have sought to offset costs by contracting services out to private businesses. 

Yet privatization may not be the balm that lawmakers and elected officials hope. Privatization often leads to higher, and more, fees, while decreasing wages and benefits as government workers are replaced by lower-paid contractors, according to a report​ from policy research group In the Public Interest. 

A private business’ “goal will be to generate as much money as possible at the lowest cost,” said Donald Cohen, executive director of In the Public Interest. “At a larger level, we are taking what is a public responsibility and a public good and shifting the responsibility of payment to the individual. It turns us from citizens into consumers.”

The growing reliance on privatization around the U.S. has also come at a time when more Americans believe “the government can do no right,” Cohen said. 

Meanwhile, privatization often leads to troubling outcomes for Americans.

Take the spread of for-profit probation companies, which are relied on by more than 1,000 courts to sentence hundreds of thousands of people to probation, often because of unpaid fines for traffic tickets and other minor infractions. For-profit companies such as Judicial Correction Services don’t charge the courts or towns for their services, which may seem appealing to elected officials. Instead, they make money by tacking on fees to the initial traffic ticket. 

When Americans are unable to pay those fees, they can end up behind bars. In one case, a woman was arrested seven times​, served 25 days in jail and paid $640 after writing a check for $28.93 that bounced. 

Existing services that are privatized also often become much more expensive for consumers, In the Public Interest found. 

Take the GED, a high-school equivalency test that was developed during World War II as a way to help returning U.S. soldiers and sailors demonstrate that they had the basic high school skills employers wanted. It was a pen-and-paper test that cost $30 to take -- until it was privatized.

In 2014, the nonprofit American Council on Education outsourced the test to the for-profit education company Pearson. The cost of taking the GED jumped $120 and switched to computer-based testing. Since then, the number of people taking the GED have plunged by two-thirds, along with the percentage of those who pass it. 

“Lots of different decision makers and people who opine may think, ‘An extra $90, what’s the big deal?’” Cohen said. “It’s a big deal for someone who is trying to get their GED.” 

When it comes to the IRS, the agency has tried outsourcing tax collection before. It wasn’t successful. The National Taxpayer Advocate, Nina Olson, wrote in a 2008 report​ that the private program not only fell short of its collection goals, but also that it was “an inherently governmental function, which should only be undertaken by IRS employees trained to protect taxpayer rights.” (Bold mine)

With its latest effort at privatization, the IRS said that its four private collections companies would have to abide by the consumer protection provisions in the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act. Yet debt collectors are no strangers to breaking the provisions in the law, with the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau collecting $13 million in 2014 in fines for “egregious debt collection violations.”

Privatization ‘is the most regressive way to pay for services, more than sales taxes or anything else,’ Cohen said. ‘If our goal is to reduce poverty and crime, the last thing you would want to do is make someone poorer and trap them in debt.’”

3.      3. State employees are lazy, overpaid and incompetent.

From the first days of your taking office you have displayed arrogance toward state employees whom you saw as lazy, overpaid and incompetent. Those who disagreed with you, you just fired. With others you created such untenable working conditions so that they had no recourse but to quit. Lower level employees were dealt with by incompetent commissioners hired by you who drove out good employees and let the incompetent ones remain thus creating a self-fulfilling prophecy where you could say, “See? I told you that they were incompetent.”

I knew many state employees who were dedicated to those they served. I know of one individual in DCF (Department of Children and Families) who at his own expense attended workshops and conferences to improve his skills. All he asked for was the time. He knew that the state would not pay for out-of-state meetings and workshops. So this person paid for those out of his own pocket.

From day one, you created such a toxic workplace that many staff turned on each other in this effort to survive. In all my years of work, in good and bad environments, I have never seen such a toxic atmosphere.

There are many more false assumptions that I do not have the time to list but underlying all of these beliefs and assumptions was an attitude of arrogance. The ancient Greeks had a word for it, hubris. Hubris or overwhelming pride according to Greek civilization was always punished by the gods. Greek stories, mythology and literature are filled with examples of people whose hubris led to their destruction.

However, many of us reading this letter have been trapped by our own false assumptions including myself. I hope that those who read this open letter will from time-to-time pause and evaluate our own beliefs and assumptions.

I hope you will not see this letter as gloating or an expression of schadenfreude. I hope you will use the information to reexamine your own beliefs and assumptions. You have had two strikes. It is not too late to redeem yourself. I urge you to use the next two and one-half years to reassess yourself and your beliefs. I hope you are able to rise above your old self.

Melvin C. Hathorn