Venezuela isn’t liberated yet; its oil has only switched sides

By CHRIS POWELL

President Trump’s people say the U.S. military raid in Venezuela to abduct President Nicolas Maduro wasn’t an act of war. Then why was it conducted with so many ships and aircraft operated by the War Department? If the raid was just an ordinary arrest, why did it kill scores of people, many of them Maduro’s bodyguards? Why is the United States blockading Venezuela’s coast and seizing ships on the high seas? These are all acts of war.

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And since no war was declared, how was the U.S. raid any different than the infamous sneak attack by Japan on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941? If Maduro’s Venezuela was such a threat, why couldn’t the United States have declared war first?

Democratic members of Congress, including Connecticut’s, warn that the intervention in Venezuela may become another “forever war” in pursuit of “nation building” like the wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan. But President Trump’s bluster notwithstanding, the United States is not going to occupy Venezuela militarily. Rather, the U.S. will bully, coerce, and essentially colonize the country by controlling its oil exports. If Venezuela descends into war, it will be a civil war between the gangster regime and democratic factions.

Trump says he has liberated Venezuela, which is nonsense. Maduro’s government remains in power and, indeed, Trump prefers it to a quick transition to a fairly elected government. 

No, if Venezuela is to be liberated, it will have to be done by Venezuelans themselves, including the millions who fled the country to escape the gangsters. As much as the Venezuelan exiles in the United States are cheering Maduro’s removal, they aren’t likely to go back.

Democratic members of Congress, including Connecticut’s, condemn Trump, a Republican, for failing to get congressional authorization for the raid on Venezuela. But Trump’s Democratic predecessors, Barack Obama and Joe Biden, also launched military attacks around the world, which didn’t bother Connecticut’s Democratic congressmen.

U.S. security is at stake in Venezuela. The drug dealing for which Maduro has been federally indicted is only a tiny part of it. More drugs come into the United States from China via Mexico but Trump is not going to tell the War Department to abduct Xi Jinping, who has nuclear weapons and a navy larger than ours. 

With Maduro and his predecessor, Hugo Chavez, in power, the biggest adversaries of the United States, China and Russia, gained footholds in Venezuela from which they more easily might attack the U.S. Presumably now the U.S. will coerce Venezuela into expelling the Chinese and Russians. But that might have been accomplished by a blockade alone after invocation of the Monroe Doctrine and a declaration of war, without the sneak attack and the killing.

And now that booting China and Russia out of Venezuela is a big concern, maybe Americans will begin to understand Russia’s violent reaction to the U.S.-supported overthrow of the pro-Russian government of Ukraine in 2014 and the new Ukrainian government’s interest in joining NATO. Maybe some Americans will even recall the blockade President Kennedy threw around Cuba in 1962 when Russia began installing nuclear missiles there. No great power can tolerate being threatened on its own borders — neither the U.S. nor Russia.

Ever megalomaniacal, Trump loves to bully and play tough guy. If he’s the dealmaker he thinks he is, he would do best not to try to “run” Venezuela but to make a deal with the gangsters still in power there, try to ease them out gradually, and return to running his own country. But he also wants to run Iran, Nigeria, Gaza, and even Greenland.

Will his toughness and recklessness in Venezuela and his imperial ambitions deter China from attacking Taiwan and deter Russia from bombing more apartment buildings in Ukraine? Or will it encourage the bad guys in their own imperialism?

Whatever happens, how much consolation will it be that Maduro and his thugs aren’t stealing Venezuela’s oil anymore — because the United States is?

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

So where are the fathers? And town farms aren’t cruel

By CHRIS POWELL

Much of the social disintegration riddling Connecticut ends up on the doorstep of the state Department of Children Families, on which is thrust responsibility for the children of irresponsible parents. The department sometimes makes mistakes, but while nearly all its mistakes are secondary to the mistakes of people who failed to take care of their children, the department typically is blamed for theirs as well. 

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State legislators and journalists are good at casting blame but not always fairly. 

This has been demonstrated by the recent case of Jacqueline “Mimi” Torres-Garcia, the 11-year-old alleged to have been abused, starved, and murdered by her own family members in 2024, her body then stuffed in a storage bin and not found for a year. The evidence is that the people responsible for the child’s death deceived child protection agents.

But as was inadvertently indicated by a recent report from the Connecticut Mirror, the bigger problem of child neglect and abuse in the state has nothing to do with DCF. 

The Mirror examined the department’s efforts to increase “kinship care” for children who are removed from their parents. DCF figures that such children will do better and be less traumatized if they stay with other family members or close friends, and the Mirror cited as an example a woman in Danbury who instantly agreed to take in the five young children of her sister though she hardly knew them.

Apart from the woman’s generosity and heroism, the Mirror report may have been most interesting for what it omitted. The word “father” didn’t appear even once.

Maybe the father of the five kids cited in the report is dead. Maybe he was part of the abuse or neglect they suffered. Maybe there are multiple fathers to the kids, and none is helping.

In any case about a third of Connecticut’s children are growing up without a father in their home or closely involved in their lives. The figure is far higher in the state’s impoverished cities. Fatherlessness correlates heavily with children’s educational failure, physical and mental illness, and crime, and how the causes of fatherlessness relate to government welfare policy is far more worthy of legislative and journalistic investigation than the occasional possible failures of DCF.

* * *

The recent suggestion by this column that Connecticut should revive the “town farms” it had in olden times has been dismissed with disdain. It is said: How backward, retrograde, and cruel.

Not at all. For Connecticut’s town farms were just early attempts at what now is called “supportive housing,” simple lodging for troubled people: the chronically mentally ill, the disabled, drug-addicted, broke, shiftless, or demoralized — society’s walking wounded. Town farms sheltered, clothed, and fed them under supervision in exchange for their labor on the farm or around the farmhouse. The town farm aimed to earn enough money to support itself and keep its residents from starving, freezing, or being a public nuisance. A few even recovered enough to take care of themselves.

What is backward, retrograde, and cruel is Connecticut’s current treatment of such people, as the state might have noticed during the recent terrible cold spell. The governor repeatedly declared a “cold weather protocol” to open or alert shelters and “warming centers” so the state’s homeless population, estimated at nearly 4,000 people, might be able at least to come indoors somewhere. But most of the estimated 3,000 shelter beds around the state are said to be always full and people are frequently turned away.

Permanent barracks-type housing — with showers and toilets, visits by medical staff, and the therapy of mandatory work to help support the facility — is not available for most of Connecticut’s homeless. When the “cold weather protocol” is discontinued, many return to sleep in cars, on the couches of friends and relatives, or in outdoor encampments, which bring them no closer to the chance of a normal life.

Now that’s retrograde and cruel, and it’s today, not long ago.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

Bridgeport’s prospects brighten amid stunning decline in murders

By CHRIS POWELL

For decades Bridgeport has been Connecticut’s worst concentration camp for the poor, easily defeating Hartford, New Haven, and Waterbury for murders, mayhem, wretched poverty, and depravity. State government has taken the city seriously only in regard to the pluralities it produces for Democrats despite its seemingly eternal wretchedness.

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But the other day Bridgeport’s veteran journalist, author, and historian, Lennie Grimaldi, broke on his internet site, OnlyInBridgeport.com, what he fairly suggested could be Connecticut’s story of the year, though it is yet to be told elsewhere. That is, Bridgeport, long considered the state’s crime capital, having experienced 50 or more murders per year back in the 1990s, had only three in 2025, far below the year’s totals in New Haven (16) and Hartford (11). Other major crimes in the city are down too.

Meanwhile Bridgeport’s population is rising again and has surpassed 150,000, securing its status as the state’s largest city.

Grimaldi speculates that the improvement results in part from federal and local police action against gangs, improvements in housing projects, and more community engagement by the police. One must hope it’s not just a fluke.

Maybe the city’s old geographic advantages are reclaiming some appeal too. It has an excellent harbor and is developing a commercial and residential project there. It’s on the Metro-North and Amtrak rail line as well as Interstate 95, only slightly less convenient to New York City than prosperous Stamford but more convenient to New Haven’s higher education and medical institutions. The Hartford HealthCare Amphitheater downtown is a regional draw and a soccer stadium may be built. The city has a university and a community college.

But as with Connecticut’s other cities, Bridgeport’s overwhelming problem remains its demographics, its concentration of poverty, its lack of a large, self-sufficient middle class that can staff a more competent, less selfish municipal government, a government that remains compromised by excessive Democratic patronage and absentee ballot scandals. 

And then, of course, there are the thousands of fatherless children in the city’s schools, many of them virtually illiterate and demoralized because of neglect at home. State government finally has taken note of the dysfunction of Bridgeport’s school system and is intervening somewhat, if not enough. But education will always be mostly a matter of parenting.    

While the city’s property taxes remain nearly the highest in the state, property taxes are high in all Connecticut’s cities, in large part because of state government’s refusal to let cities control labor costs and its failure to insist on better results for the huge amount of state funding cities receive. 

Mayor Joe Ganim may be doing as well as a mayor in Connecticut can do under urban circumstances. At least he seems to have put his corruption behind him, having been convicted and jailed after his first stint as mayor.

Neither Bridgeport nor Connecticut’s other cities can repair themselves on their own. Their futures will be determined mainly by how much the state wants its cities to do more than manufacture poverty while keeping the desperately poor and their pathologies out of the suburbs — whether the state ever wants to examine and act seriously against the policy causes of poverty, which were operating long before Donald Trump became president.

It should not require a Ph.D. to see that subsidizing childbearing outside marriage with various welfare benefits and then socially promoting fatherless children through school, leaving them uneducated in adulthood and qualified only for menial work, has not led them to self-sufficiency and prosperity but rather to dependence, generational poverty, and mayhem. Only the poverty administrators prosper from such policy.

Indeed, Connecticut seems to think that instead of two parents every child should have a social worker and a probation officer, as well as a “baby bonds” account with the state treasurer’s office to ease the burdens to be faced after being raised without two parents.

The “baby bonds” are new but the rest of it is old and just makes poverty worse.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

‘Gender-affirming care’ euphemizes sex changes

By CHRIS POWELL

Propaganda is often a matter of names and terminology. For as the Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan observed, if you label something well enough, you don’t have to argue with it or about it. The label itself may settle the matter politically.

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For many years in politically correct places like Connecticut calling people “racist” has been enough to shut most of them up or defeat a proposed course of action. This racket is starting to fail from overuse in part because indignation about supposed racism has failed to lift up the state’s minority population, which remains nearly as poor and segregated as ever even as the people who denounce racism have been running the state for decades.

The propagandistic labeling most in use in Connecticut now involves the Trump administration’s proposal to forbid hospitals from using federal Medicare and Medicaid money for sex-change therapy for minors.

“This is not medicine,” U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says. “It is malpractice. Sex-rejecting procedures rob children of their futures.”

Noting that the administration’s action is only a proposal, Connecticut Attorney General William Tong replies: “Gender-affirming care remains legal and protected in Connecticut. Donald Trump is not a doctor, and we’re not going to let his cruel political agenda dictate access to healthcare or decimate our hospitals. We are exploring all legal options to protect Connecticut families and our medical providers.”

Yes, Trump and Kennedy are not doctors. But then neither is Tong, and many doctors agree with Trump and Kennedy. Indeed, medical opinion increasingly holds that most children will get over their gender dysphoria if they are not locked into it by “puberty blockers,” hormone injections, and surgeries. Even people who aren’t sure about the best response to gender dysphoria may concede that irreversible treatment is best postponed until children can decide as informed adults.

Contrary to the attorney general’s suggestion, the Trump administration has not proposed to make gender dysphoria treatment illegal. It has proposed only to prevent life-altering treatments for minors from being federally financed. States could spend their own money on such treatments.

Maybe it will come to that in Connecticut. At least Tong has joined nearly all news organizations in the state in the propaganda war over gender dysphoria. That’s what their terminology — “gender-affirming care” — is about. 

The neutral and accurately descriptive term here is “sex-change therapy.” Calling it “gender-affirming care,” as the attorney general and the news organizations do, euphemizes it to presume that there is really no controversy at all, nothing to be questioned — that the desire of minors to change their sex should automatically be “affirmed” with “care.” 

After all, who could be against “care” except people who, as Tong says, have a “cruel political agenda”? People who disagree with him on this issue couldn’t be sincerely concerned about troubled children, could they? They must be drooling MAGA freaks, and maybe racist too — right?

Or else the attorney general is a demagogue and is being sustained by news organizations that prefer politically correct demagoguery to being fair.

NEW HAVEN’S BRAZEN CONTEMPT: New Haven city government’s contempt for the public interest in accountable government has gotten more brazen.

A few weeks ago Mayor Justin Elicker, who is also a member of the city’s Board of Education, defended the board’s decision not to perform a written evaluation of the school superintendent, only an oral one conducted in secret. The mayor said it wouldn’t be productive if city residents knew much about how she was doing.

Now, according to the New Haven Independent, the Elicker administration is mocking the public interest again. It is performing written evaluations of city department heads but only insofar as the evaluations say “satisfactory” or “unsatisfactory.” There are no specifics.

Should the department heads improve in some way? The public isn’t to know or have any way to judge. 

New Haven is proudly the most liberal jurisdiction in the state, and this is what liberalism has come to. 

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

Illegal immigrant’s supporters celebrate lack of due process

By CHRIS POWELL

Is Kevin Moreno’s return to Connecticut a triumph of justice and due process of law? 

Advocates of open borders think so. They celebrated with him at a rally in Meriden on Christmas Eve, hours before his 17th birthday, along with U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, city officials, religious leaders, and others who supported efforts to get the teenager released from an immigration detention shelter for minors in Texas after being held in government custody for six months. 

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Speaking in Spanish translated by one of his lawyers, Kevin said: “It’s very hard to go through this process, and I’ve seen a lot of people who have done badly because of it. … We’re all human and we shouldn’t be treated like this.”

So how should someone in Kevin’s circumstances be treated?

Apparently Kevin and his father entered the United States illegally from Mexico in February 2024, claiming to be fleeing gang violence in their homeland, Ecuador. They were briefly held by the Border Patrol and then, under the Biden administration’s open borders policy, given a summons to a hearing in immigration court in Hartford eight months hence, and released. But like most illegal immigrants so summoned, they skipped their hearing. 

Kevin’s father says someone impersonating an immigration lawyer told him their problem had been resolved and they needn’t go to court. When they failed to appear, the judge ordered them removed, but they were not immediately found.

Eventually Kevin and his father did make contact with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Hartford and appeared there in June for what they thought would be a routine check. Instead they were arrested and sent to a detention center in Texas, with Kevin then transferred to the shelter for minors and his father returned to Ecuador.

Recently Kevin’s supporters persuaded an immigration judge in Hartford to vacate the order for his removal and persuaded a federal magistrate in Texas to order ICE to attend a hearing on Kevin’s case. Instead ICE released him to his aunt in Connecticut, to whom a probate court had awarded custody. Kevin now may qualify for a program for minors that may give him permanent residency.

ICE sometimes disregards due process but this isn’t one of those cases. The violations of due process here are those of Kevin and his father. 

They entered the country illegally, confident in the Biden administration’s own disregard of due process, its decision not to enforce immigration law at the border but to admit millions of foreigners without any vetting, even though most would never attend the immigration hearings to which they were summoned. Indeed, Kevin and his father also skipped their hearing.

Even if their stories about violence in Ecuador and the fake immigration lawyer are true, they don’t constitute exemptions from the law, which Kevin and his father set out to break. 

By all accounts Kevin is a great young man who has made many friends during his two years living illegally in Meriden. But that doesn’t cancel immigration law either. (Kevin graduated from high school in Meriden a year early not just because of school credits he earned in Ecuador that Meriden’s school system accepted but also because Meriden provides education in both English and Spanish, apparently unconvinced that all Americans should be able to speak English.)

Of course permanent residency — legal or just de-facto, living in limbo — is the objective of nearly everyone who enters the United States illegally. Apart from his having made influential friends, has Kevin done anything to deserve both permanent residency and a place in line superior to the millions of others who entered illegally and are living without influential friends? Where’s the due process in that?

Maybe the due process question does not concern Kevin’s friends because, as advocates of open borders, they would waive ordinary review procedures for everyone coming across the border, not just Kevin. That is, they would abolish due process, immigration law, and, along with them, the country itself.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

Connecticut should push people to pull their own weight

By CHRIS POWELL

Theodore Roosevelt, who in his time was considered good liberal authority, noted that the first duty of a citizen is to pull his own weight. Only then, Roosevelt said, can a citizen’s surplus strength be of use to society. 

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So it is strange that so many people who consider themselves liberals are horrified by the new federal law that sharply limits food subsidies for able-bodied single adults who aren’t working. The liberals shriek that the new rule may eliminate food subsidies for as many 36,000 people in Connecticut unless they can show they are working at least 80 hours per month.

What’s the big deal about that? Eighty hours per month is not even 20 hours per week. Any able-bodied single adult who can’t work 20 hours per week to support himself and thereby earn his government food subsidy needs a lot more motivation to stop being a burden on society and to start pulling his own weight.

But government in Connecticut is not in a good position to scold people for shiftlessness when it long has been running up the cost of living — even putting hidden taxes on residential electricity — and thereby discouraging those who already may be down on their luck, demoralized, or lacking job skills, as many socially promoted graduates of Connecticut’s high schools lack them. 

Indeed, as the state’s rising cost of living pushes many people toward poverty and even homelessness, state government should be providing the destitute with more than food — but in exchange for work. State government should be providing them with emergency, barracks-type housing and jobs with which they can begin to earn their benefits until they can live on their own — an arrangement like the town farms of old.

The key would be to push people toward self-sufficiency and away from the demoralization that welfare causes and the irresponsibility that leads to welfare dependence. 

Such a system would not solve the problems of the many homeless people who are chronically mentally ill. But at least enough barracks-type housing would allow them to get off the street during cold weather, to bathe and use a toilet, and have a little privacy, a prerequisite of sanity.

As a matter of fairness only state government can take responsibility for those who aren’t taking or can’t take responsibility for themselves. Municipalities and churches don’t have adequate resources for this. 

New Haven particularly is overwhelmed by homeless people, many mentally ill, who, along with their advocates, are pressing city government to open more shelters, which will draw still more homeless and mentally ill people to the city.

One of those advocates was quoted last week as saying it’s “immoral” that New Haven “doesn’t have a plan to ensure that everyone has a guaranteed right to shelter throughout the winter.” Mayor Justin Elicker replied that the city does more for the homeless than any other municipality in the state — that the city maintains seven shelters and spends $1.5 million per year on the homeless.  

The mayor might have asked: When did New Haven and its taxpayers become responsible for all the region’s homeless and mentally ill?

While a homeless man died overnight on the New Haven Green this month, at almost the same time two homeless people died outdoors in Stamford. This is a statewide problem — an estimated 800 people in Connecticut are living outdoors and 3,000 in shelters, and more than 130 homeless people have died while living outdoors in the state this year. Now that it’s cold, shelters usually have to turn people away because they are full.

The homeless and uninstitutionalized mentally ill constitute an emergency. Connecticut needs a government agency to take them all in hand — to ensure not just that they can get state medical insurance and food but also that they can have a cot in a safe barracks, and that they are required to do some work to cover their expense and accept their responsibility to pull their own weight.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

Waterbury’s water disaster is a political lesson for all

By CHRIS POWELL

Waterbury suffered another catastrophic breakdown of its water system this month, the second since September, with most of the city and parts of its suburbs having to go without water for several days. 

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In both breakdowns city employees worked heroically around the clock to repair the damage, which was caused by the rupture of century-old piping.

Waterbury now plans to spend millions of dollars to replace old pipes and valves. But as indicated by the recent disasters and the smaller pipe breaks the city often suffers, the improvements should have been made long ago.

Waterbury is hardly alone in its neglect of infrastructure. The neglect of Hartford’s sewer system has been notorious and only this year started to get serious attention when it was noted that the worst damage was occurring in the city’s poorest neighborhood. Other municipalities in Connecticut are also living with old and potentially troublesome piping.

Why? It’s ordinary politics. As journalist James Reston said, all politics is based on the indifference of the majority. The public seldom cares much and pays little attention, so the squeaky wheels — and palms — get the grease. 

Basic infrastructure can be expensive and there is no influential constituency for maintenance and improvements until a vital system collapses and most people suffer from it and reluctantly concede that to fix the problem money must be spent and taxes probably raised. 

Elected officials know that it’s easy to raise the money for basic infrastructure when it collapses, but it’s hard to raise money for infrastructure when it seems to be working and is competing with all other demands on government, many of which come from influential constituencies. 

So elected officials may not worry much about infrastructure collapses, knowing that repair money will always be made available after a collapse, even if repairs cost far more than good maintenance would have.

Connecticut’s most influential constituency, unionized government employees, even has a special system of law to ensure its contentment: binding arbitration of union contracts. The law removes from the ordinary democratic process control of government employee compensation, which is most state and municipal government spending.

These days the people of the Waterbury area particularly and people throughout the state generally might do well to ask themselves: Why is there no binding arbitration for neglected basic infrastructure? Why is there no binding arbitration for, say, some other recently publicized failures of state government policy, the neglected needs of the homeless mentally ill and autistic children and their families?

Why has Governor Lamont promised 4.5% raises for unionized state employees but nothing for the homeless mentally ill and autistic children?

It’s because the special interests are always mobilized politically while the public interest is seldom mobilized, mainly because journalism about serious issues, like literacy generally, is declining and because elected officials lack the courage to risk offending special interests by trying to mobilize the public interest, which is usually contrary to the special interest.

If Connecticut ever wants a better public life, it will need a better public.

END COURTHOUSE SANCTUARY: A Wisconsin state judge has just been convicted in federal court of obstructing enforcement of federal immigration law. She helped an illegal immigrant evade arrest in her courthouse. 

Courthouses are good places for catching lawbreakers, since many lawbreakers are chronic. On average non-citizens may be better behaved than citizens, but this doesn’t really excuse illegal immigration, as supporters of illegal immigration suggest; the average is no consolation to people who have been wronged by someone in the group with the better average.

The Wisconsin case impugns Connecticut’s latest law obstructing immigration law enforcement, a law purporting to prohibit federal agents from making arrests in state courthouses. The law’s nonsensical rationale is that everyone should feel safe in a Connecticut courthouse — even people violating immigration law.

So what is to happen if, as in Wisconsin, court officials in Connecticut help illegal immigrants evade arrest? And why should someone breaking immigration law feel safe anywhere?

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

It’s a wonderful life, and a political one

By CHRIS POWELL

Frank Capra’s 1946 film, “It’s a Wonderful Life,” to be broadcast again Christmas Eve at 8 p.m. by NBC television, is loved most for its personal message of discovery at Christmas: that its hero’s life has been, unbeknownst to him, crucial to his family, friends, community, and even his country.

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Such general encouragement may seem more needed than ever these days; indeed, this may be, sadly, the cause of the film’s popularity. But “It’s a Wonderful Life” may be more important still for its overlooked lesson in democratic economics, a lesson arising from the struggle for survival of a combination credit union and savings bank, the Bailey Building & Loan in the Everytown of Bedford Falls.

The Building & Loan’s founder and chief executive, Peter Bailey, has died and its board of directors is deciding the institution’s future. The richest man in town, Potter, a misanthropic banker, cruel landlord, and Building & Loan board member, played by Lionel Barrymore, proposes dissolving the institution, and his callousness angers Bailey’s elder son, George, played earnestly by Jimmy Stewart, who has been working as assistant to his father.

*

POTTER: Peter Bailey was not a businessman. That’s what killed him. Oh, I don’t mean any disrespect to him, God rest his soul. He was a man of high ideals — so-called. But ideals without common sense can ruin this town. Now you take this loan here, to Ernie Bishop. You know, the fellow who sits around all day on his … brains, in his taxi. I happen to know the bank turned down this loan. But he comes here, and we’re building him a house worth $5,000. Why?

GEORGE BAILEY: Well, I handled that, Mr. Potter. You have all the papers there — his salary, insurance. I can personally vouch for his character.

POTTER: A friend of yours.

BAILEY: Yes, Sir.

POTTER: You see, if you shoot pool with some employee, you can come and borrow money. What does that get us? A discontented, lazy rabble instead of a thrifty working class. And all because a few starry-eyed dreamers like Peter Bailey stir them up and fill their heads with a lot of impossible ideas. Now I say. …

BAILEY: Now hold on, Mr. Potter. Just a minute. Now you’re right when you say my father was no businessman — I know that. Why he ever started this cheap, penny-ante building-and-loan I’ll never know. But neither you nor anyone else can say anything against his character, because his whole life was. … Why, in the 25 years since he and Uncle Billy started this thing, he never thought of himself. Isn’t that right, Uncle Billy? He didn’t save enough money to send Harry to school, let alone me, but he did help a few people get out of your slums, Mr. Potter. Now what’s wrong with that? Why, you’re all businessmen here. Doesn’t it make them better citizens? Doesn’t it make them better customers? You said that … what did you say a minute ago? “They have to wait and save their money before they even think of a decent home.” Wait? Wait for what? Until their children grow up and leave them? Until they’re so old and broken-down that they. … Do you know how long it takes a working man to save $5,000? Just remember this, Mr. Potter: that this “rabble” you’re talking about, they do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this community. Well, is it too much to have them work and pay and live and die in a couple of decent rooms and a bath? Anyway, my father didn’t think so. …

*

At the board’s insistence, George Bailey takes over in his father’s place to keep the Building & Loan going, and soon he forestalls a run on it, part of a general financial panic, by putting up the money he has saved for his honeymoon and by preaching to a mob of frightened depositors about how they should not withdraw their money but instead have faith in the institution, because their money isn’t kept in cash in the safe but rather is invested in the houses, the mortgages, the very lives of their neighbors.

Of course this is Capra’s metaphor for politics and the world: that there is progress when everyone is given a chance, a little capital and credit, when people play by the rules, look out for each other, and don’t take too much more than they need, and that selfishness is the ruin of everything.

Something like this — more or less a policy of helping to make middle-class everyone who aspired to it and would indeed play by the rules, a policy of democratizing capital and credit — made the United States the most prosperous country and the most successful in elevating the human condition.

But for some decades now the price of obtaining and maintaining those “two decent rooms and a bath” and the middle-class life to go with it has risen as real wages have stagnated, largely under the pressure of government’s unrelenting taxes and inflation in the name of services that have not really been rendered, a welfare system that has subsidized what somehow is not permitted to be called the antisocial behavior it is, and a plutocracy that has gained control of the economy and both major political parties.

There seem to be more people who, if too confused or demoralized to be dangerous, are still closer to being a “rabble” than the country saw even during the Great Depression.

Even at its best now Christmas is seldom more than an itinerant charity that, necessary as it may seem, tends to suppress the great political question of the day after Christmas, the Feast of Stephen: the question of how things can be organized to ensure that everyone has a good chance to earn his way in decency. But the joy of Christmas is that the answer has been given, that we are not lost, that the country was shown the way and can recover it — that society can work for all, that it really can be a wonderful life if enough selfless people make it a political one.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

-END-

Immigration law enforcement can succeed without cruelty

By CHRIS POWELL

Democratic U.S. senators, led by Connecticut’s Richard Blumenthal, the ranking minority member of the Senate’s Permanent Committee on Investigations, held a hearing at the Capitol the other day to publicize mistakes and misconduct by federal immigration agents, particularly their arrests of U.S. citizens and their excessive use of force. The testimony, as Blumenthal said, was “troubling,” more so since members of the Senate’s Republican majority declined to attend lest they help embarrass the Trump administration.

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But everyone should be embarrassed.

Republicans should acknowledge that immigration enforcement has gotten reckless when U.S. citizens are not only being arrested but sometimes detained for days before their citizenship is established and they are released.

Democrats, including Blumenthal, should acknowledge that the immigration mess and its cruelty are largely their party’s fault, arising from their last national administration’s opening the borders, allowing millions of foreigners to enter without review, and claiming that nothing could stop it except new laws. When the Trump administration began enforcing the laws as they were, illegal entries were quickly brought way down.

Immigration law enforcement is necessary to protect the country, to ensure that immigrants are committed to a democratic and secular political culture, not theocratic fascism, and to restore fairness to the immigration system. But immigration raids and the resulting cruelty could be avoided by adopting a few simple policies.

First, Congress could require all employers to use the federal government’s internet-based “e-Verify” system of confirming a job applicant’s legal standing to work in the United States. The system compares employment forms submitted by applicants to employers against federal government records to confirm eligibility for employment. If an applicant’s records don’t match, an employer must not hire him.

The system isn’t foolproof but conscientious people can correct its mistakes. It’s not too much to demand that people maintain copies of their birth certificates or certificates of authorization to work in the United States.

Second, since it’s already a federal crime to hire illegal immigrants knowingly, enforcement should concentrate on employers rather than grabbing people off the street. Many employers too easily accept the word of applicants that they are legally entitled to work. Employers should be required to make job applicants produce proof of citizenship or eligibility to work. Nothing might discourage illegal immigration like the well-publicized prosecution and imprisonment of a few dozen irresponsible employers in each state.

Third, federal law should forbid states from issuing identification documents, including driver’s licenses, unless the requesters prove their citizenship. Having long issued such identification documents to illegal immigrants, states like Connecticut have been deliberately facilitating illegal immigration. 

Indeed, this racket may have started in New Haven in 2007 when the city introduced its Elm City Identification Card precisely to help illegal immigrants live in the city in violation of immigration law. Of course some people don’t drive and need some official form of identification other than a driver’s license, and states and municipalities should be able to provide it — but only when the applicant shows proof of citizenship or eligibility for long-term residency in the country.

And fourth, federal law should forbid providing any government services or benefits to illegal immigrants, including education, except for emergency medical care. 

If such procedures were in place, illegal immigration might end peacefully, since as a practical matter living in the country illegally would become all but impossible. Illegal immigrants would strive to become legal fast or they would return to their native countries voluntarily without risking capture and deportation.

Of course most Democrats in Connecticut oppose effective immigration law enforcement. They refuse to distinguish between legal and illegal immigration and want state government to keep obstructing enforcement. This is part of the national Democratic scheme to use illegal immigrants to increase the population in Democratic areas and thus to increase the number of Democratic congressional and state legislative districts. 

To most Democrats, gaining permanent control of the government is worth any amount of cruelty to their pawns.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

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Don’t ask government employees if state should raise taxes

By CHRIS POWELL

According to state Sen. Jan Hochadel, D-Meriden, Connecticut shouldn’t be afraid of taxing the wealthy more.

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In a newspaper essay last week Hochadel cited a study done last year by something called A Better Connecticut Institute. The study, the senator wrote, contended that “income taxes play almost no role in where high-earning individuals choose to live,” and that “when states raise taxes on top earners, the number of wealthy residents who actually leave is statistically insignificant,” only around 2%.

“Wealthy people, like everyone else, care about more than their tax bill,” Hochadel wrote — they also care about schools, public services, public safety, economic opportunities, and such.

Well, of course. But no one says the wealthy care only about taxes and not about those other things. They care about many things, including taxes. It is a matter of judgment and degree.

Besides, who exactly should be considered wealthy for tax purposes? 

The senator writes of “millionaires,” but when retirement savings are added, housing price inflation has made millionaires of tens of thousands of Connecticut residents who are not close to being plutocrats but still pay a lot in taxes. Millionaires are not as rich as they used to be.

Maybe certain billionaires don’t care about Connecticut’s income tax, but then why have so many state residents who are not billionaires been moving to Florida and other low-tax southern states as they near retirement and even before? Why are states that don’t tax their residents as much as Connecticut does growing economically and in population even as Connecticut’s economy is stagnant and its population might be decreasing if not for the illegal immigration state government encourages?

As Connecticut’s illegal immigration from Central America and the Caribbean suggests, migration is not entirely a matter of warmer winters. Those illegal immigrants see more money for themselves where there are colder winters. Contrary to Hochadel’s suggestion, money and people still tend to go where they are treated best.

Liberal Democratic state legislators like Hochadel have two reasons for framing their desire to increase state government spending as a matter of raising taxes only on the wealthy. 

First is that these legislators can’t make a good case for spending more on the merits of the spending itself, a case that would persuade the less than wealthy. For decades these legislators have been bleating about poverty in Connecticut and appropriating more to alleviate it without reducing poverty at all. Some state government policies plainly perpetuate poverty. No state government seeking to reduce poverty would subsidize childbearing outside marriage and run schools by social promotion as Connecticut does. But ministering to poverty and making it generational provides much political patronage for Democrats.  

Second is that while state government still neglects much human need, liberal Democratic legislators, being the tools of the government employee unions, don’t dare to examine the mismanagement, waste, fraud, and general excess in government, where much money could be saved. Reports in this regard by news organizations and the state auditors almost always pass without comment from liberal Democratic legislators. Most look away even from federal prosecutions of corruption in state government.    

Now that Connecticut has become a one-party state, Democrats have become the party of government for its own sake — not the party of efficient and effective government. Hochadel’s essay revealed her as an embodiment of this problem.

The organization whose study the senator cited in her essay, A Better Connecticut Institute, consists mainly of government employee unions, and Hochadel herself is an officer of the Connecticut chapter of the American Federation of Teachers.

That is, the institute represents mostly state and municipal government employees, who just happen to be the recipients of most state and municipal government tax revenue. 

Just as you shouldn’t ask the barber if you need a haircut, you shouldn’t seek advice from government employee unions about whether taxes should be raised so more money can be spent on their members. Bettering Connecticut requires much more than making government employees happy.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)