Medicaid could be reduced; and deliver the voter rolls

By CHRIS POWELL

State Comptroller Sean Scanlon warns that Connecticut’s state budget is in danger of being devoured by its Medicaid program, whose costs are soaring even as federal aid to the program is being reduced. To ensure that the state’s approximately one million Medicaid recipients maintain their health insurance coverage, Scanlon says “every option should be on the table.” 

Lamont’s ‘unfinished business’ shouldn’t wait for another term

Economizing in schools is illegal; and four years of paid leave drag on

Connecticut’s minimum wage increase indicates worsening poverty

But Scanlon doesn’t really mean that. He means that every possibility for raising more money for Medicaid should be considered, not every possibility for economizing.

There are obvious opportunities for economizing.

Since Connecticut is a “sanctuary state,” a state facilitating and extolling illegal immigration, many recipients of Medicaid and other forms of state medical insurance are illegal immigrants and there is clamor to make still more illegal immigrants eligible. Of course the more that illegal immigrants are made eligible, the more other illegal immigrants will be drawn to the state. State government could save millions by disqualifying illegal immigrants from state insurance and all state government benefits. Like all people, they go where they are subsidized.

Even California, the most populous “sanctuary state,” is reducing state medical insurance for illegal immigrants because of its exploding cost.

How about reducing state financial grants to Planned Parenthood, which provides most abortions in Connecticut? Most are performed on poor women who qualify for Medicaid. State government has given much money to Planned Parenthood and Governor Lamont just awarded the organization another $10 million from the emergency $500 million slush fund the General Assembly recently created for him.

But Connecticut’s chapter of Planned Parenthood has an endowment of nearly $50 million and is in better financial condition than state government itself. So state grants to Planned Parenthood could be suspended until the organization spends its endowment down to, say, $10 million.

Most important, to reduce Medicaid costs state government should examine the causes of poverty that arise from mistaken public policy. After all, Medicaid is insurance for the poor. If, as state Comptroller Scanlon says, about a million state residents are on Medicaid, that is more than a quarter of the state’s population, and if Medicaid expenses are soaring, it’s partly because poverty in Connecticut is soaring as well, even as government spends much in the state in the name of reducing poverty.

Could someone in state government, maybe even the comptroller himself, ask why poverty is worsening?

Is it because so many Connecticut residents lack job skills? 

The state’s economy long has lagged the national economy and is not creating jobs, particularly high-skilled and high-paying jobs, as fast as many other states are. So how come?

Connecticut has a high cost of living, which makes people poor, so where is state government’s program to reduce that cost? Who in authority is reviewing state government’s costs to ensure that all spending is essential and efficient?

Of course it’s always much easier to increase Medicaid spending instead.

* * *

Why should Connecticut be refusing to give its voter registration rolls to the U.S. Justice Department for its investigation of possible election fraud? The Justice Department has had to sue for it.

Connecticut’s own freedom-of-information law makes most of the data public. Secretary of the State Stephanie Thomas says the Justice Department also wants the voter registration data that shows Social Security and driver’s license numbers, which state law forbids disclosing outside government.

But the federal government already has all Social Security numbers, and driver’s license numbers are typically available to the federal government through law enforcement data banks.

So it seems that Thomas and state Attorney General William Tong oppose providing the data simply because they detest the Trump administration and don’t want it to pursue the possibility of election fraud.

If there’s no fraud and no illegal immigrants have registered to vote in Connecticut, disclosure of the voter roll data may help confirm that. And if the data does provide evidence of fraud, shouldn’t it be disclosed even if that scares the secretary and the attorney general?

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

Lamont’s ‘unfinished business’ needn’t wait for another term

By CHRIS POWELL

Being governor is a tough job, especially in Connecticut, where thousands have their hands out and the more they’re given, the more they want and expect. The state has not prospered particularly during Ned Lamont’s two terms, but given his party’s ravenous constituencies, things probably would be worse under any other Democrat. Lamont has restrained spending and taxes more than the big Democratic majorities in the General Assembly would have liked.

Economizing in schools is illegal; and four years of paid leave drag on

Connecticut’s minimum wage increase indicates worsening poverty

‘Affordability’ doesn’t apply to cost of state employees

But state government remains poorly managed and in some cases not managed at all, as was suggested by the audit released this week by the state Economic and Community Development Department about corruption in “anti-poverty” grants that the department administered only nominally. The grants were actually controlled by state Sen. Douglas McCrory, D-Hartford, who routed them through a special friend who, the audit found, took a lot of the money for herself in the guise of providing services not actually rendered.

The governor quickly tried to take ownership of the audit, joining in its announcement. He called it “a strong reminder that when taxpayer dollars are involved, we have zero tolerance for fraud, waste, or mismanagement.” 

This was nonsense, for such grants have been routinely allocated to Democratic state legislators as raw patronage without oversight or evaluation of results. The governor has gone along with this. The corruption exposed by the audit is a matter of his own indifference and the negligence of his economic development commissioner.

The governor said Senator McCrory should “step back” from Senate business but didn’t propose to stop the patronage grants. 

And are Connecticut’s cities any less poor for the grants, or less poor for any “anti-poverty” programs? Is poverty any less of a patronage business?

In a recent interview with the Connecticut Examiner, Lamont said he was glad to answer for his record and, if elected to the third term he seeks, will address “some unfinished business.”

Where to begin? And why wait? 

Given the terrible cold descending on the state this weekend, “unfinished business” — unstarted, really — could begin with the “cold weather protocol” the governor has invoked. This happens when state government and social-service agencies summon the mentally ill off the streets at night to various overcrowded indoor facilities and send them back outside in the morning in state government’s belief that the best therapy for mental illness is fresh air. 

More than a hundred of them have died outdoors in Connecticut in the last year.

For decades this therapy has saved state government millions of dollars on mental hospitals, money spent instead on state employee raises and pensions.    

Always needing urgent review is the Correction Department. Two Fridays ago the General Assembly’s Judiciary Committee held a hearing about the department’s chronic management failures, starting with the report issued by the state auditors last July showing that 15 of the 18 failures cited by the audit were cited by previous audits as well. The new audit found that the department lately had paid more than $800,000 in salaries for excessive administrative leave.  

Two weeks ago the state inspector general concluded that the deaths of two inmates at the state prison in Newtown within days of each other in 2024 were caused by mistakes with medication administered by medical contractors. This week the department’s ombudsman issued a report criticizing not only inadequate medical care for prisoners, a longstanding issue, but also unsanitary conditions and excessive lockdowns.

The correction commissioner said again that the department aims to do better, so that will suppress the issue for another year, since nobody cares much about prisoners besides the ombudsman, whose appointment the governor obstructed.

As for state taxes, however well the governor has restrained them, much of that restraint has always been achieved by pushing what probably should be state expenses down to the municipal level, where they are recovered through higher property taxes, though Connecticut’s property taxes are disgracefully high. 

For many years that too has been “unfinished business.”

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

Economizing in schools is illegal; and four years of paid leave drag on

By CHRIS POWELL

Hamden Mayor Adam Sendroff says the town is in “a financial crisis.” Indeed, the town long has been struggling financially. So the mayor has asked town departments to reduce their budgets by 5%.

Connecticut’s minimum wage increase indicates worsening poverty

‘Affordability’ doesn’t apply to cost of state employees

Mayor panders to the mob, inviting more insurrection

But Hamden’s school superintendent, Gary Highsmith, has told the Board of Education not to worry about it. For state law forbids municipalities from reducing school budgets except in a few special circumstances, and even those don’t apply to Hamden, because, since the town’s students perform so poorly, the state Education Department has declared the school system an “alliance district,” where cutting spending is doubly prohibited.

Since Hamden’s schools spend about half the town’s money, any savings will have to be exacted disproportionately from the remaining half of town government. 

One premise of the law forbidding cutting school budgets is that student performance correlates directly with per-pupil spending, though there is little evidence for that, since student performance is almost entirely a matter of parenting. The real premise of the law is that teacher unions, the largest political force in every city and town, must be gratified at any cost.

The law is based on another nonsensical premise — that school systems are perfectly efficient and effective so there is never any need to save money. Elected officials and taxpayers shouldn’t even think about it or ask critical questions. There’s no point in that, since saving money in lower education in Connecticut is actually against the law. 

Yes, Connecticut should just keep raising taxes to gratify the teacher unions and keep electing the same people to run state government in the interest of the people on the payroll, not the interest of the public.

*

Three state government agencies are implicated in a spectacular waste of money that has failed to gain the attention of anyone in political authority. 

According to the Norwich Bulletin, an assistant principal at Ellis Technical High School in Killingly, Roland Navarro, has been on paid administrative leave for four years, having collected nearly $600,000 in salary and many thousands more in fringe benefits, and even having taken an interim job with a real estate agency to get a second income while the agencies have been pondering what to do about him — even as it seems that there’s no reason to do anything.

The story goes this way. 

One day in 2021 Navarro arrived at school forgetting that he had left a pistol in his car. He knew that guns are illegal on school property. A student rotating the tires on Navarro’s car found the pistol and alerted Navarro, who wrapped it up, took it outside, and put it in the trunk of another assistant principal’s car. At the end of the day he retrieved the pistol and took it home.

The school investigated and punished Navarro with a two-day suspension. But the state police, the Windham County state’s attorney, and the state Department of Children and Families began investigations as well. The state’s attorney charged Navarro with possession of a gun on school grounds, a felony. 

Navarro pleaded not guilty and, predictably, the court granted him accelerated rehabilitation, a probation available to first offenders, since he hadn’t meant or done any harm. Accordingly in July 2024 the charge against him was dismissed.

But DCF and the state Board of Education, from which Navarro has a teaching license, kept investigating. The board now is said to be waiting for a hearing officer’s report on a jurisdictional issue Navarro raised. If he is allowed to keep his license, the technical school system can decide whether to reinstate or fire him.

Almost five years have passed and no one in authority has hastened the case to conclusion or just pulled the plug on it. The money spent investigating case well may exceed the $600,000-plus paid to Navarro during his leave.

His accidentally leaving a gun in his car may turn out to be the financial windfall of his life even as state government seems not to have noticed the expense.

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

Connecticut’s minimum wage increase indicates worsening poverty

By CHRIS POWELL

Connecticut’s minimum wage, having been indexed to inflation since 2019, rose to $16.94 per hour this month and was celebrated by Governor Lamont and state Labor Commissioner Dante Bartolomeo.

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Minneapolis incident distracts from the big underlying issues

The governor contended that the increases have not impaired business conditions as was feared when they began. But Connecticut’s business conditions are poor. The state lags most other states in economic growth, and raising the minimum wage discourages many small businesses.

Indeed, Commissioner Bartolomeo’s celebration of the minimum wage increase actually implied severe weakness in both the economy and the state’s workforce.

“This is not just something for teenagers,” the commissioner said of the minimum wage. “This is not just an after-school job.” The minimum wage, she said, is disproportionately earned by women of color, and “this is how they support themselves and their families.”

If Connecticut really has so many people trying to support themselves and even families on minimum-wage jobs, then many people have reached adulthood without acquiring substantial job skills, or else the state’s economy is producing too many menial jobs and not enough better-paying jobs requiring skills. Or the problem may be both. And when the minimum wage goes up, inflation quickly nullifies it anyway, in part because the people advocating higher minimum wages, like the people in charge of government, don’t care much about inflation.

Connecticut’s increasing dependence on the minimum wage is an indication of worsening poverty. While politicians are chattering about “affordability,” most of the solutions they have proposed don’t address affordability at all — don’t address reducing the cost of living.  

Instead their solutions, like increasing the minimum wage, are mostly matters of increasing government subsidies to the poor at the expense of employers and taxpayers. The subsidies don’t reduce the cost of living but increase the cost of government, distort markets, and — worse — distract from and rationalize the causes of poverty.

After all, poverty correlates overwhelmingly with fatherlessness and inadequate education, and both correlate overwhelmingly with the welfare system’s destruction of the family and social promotion’s destruction of academic standards. But addressing the causes of poverty is not on the agenda of anyone in authority in Connecticut. Government just keeps throwing money at poverty without regard to results.

VOICES FOR HIGHER TAXES: The big thinkers at Connecticut Voices for Children have studied how state government can make up for reductions of hundreds of millions of dollars in federal aid to state social programs and claimed to have figured it out in a report published the other day. 

Their solution is to raise taxes and spending. Particularly:

— Diminish the “fiscal guardrails” that have restricted state government spending, prevented budget deficits, and even allowed state government to catch up a little on its pension obligations.

— Raise taxes on the rich and the most valuable estates.

— Do more auditing of taxpayers. That is, raise taxes some more.

What insight! State government can get more money by … raising taxes!

Of course this long has been the platform of the political left in Connecticut, which presumes that since raising taxes generally won’t be popular, even more of the tax burden should be put on a small minority.

In a better world tax rates, even those on the rich, would be set according to what is considered fair, and would be held there until fairness could be shown to require changing them. But in Connecticut tax rates are to be raised whenever the government wants to spend more.

State government is full of excessive spending — from its workforce to education to anti-poverty programs. Identifying and publicizing the excess, showing how it harms both taxpayers and the needy, would be a great service. But, being part of the government class, Connecticut Voices for Children never looks to the excess in state government for money that could be saved or redirected to better purposes. 

So the group would be more honest to call itself Connecticut Voices for Higher Spending and Taxes. The “children” part is just sanctimonious and tiresome whitewash.

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

‘Affordability’ doesn’t apply to cost of state employees

By CHRIS POWELL

While it would be impossible politically, freezing most state government salaries for a year or two would be fair, for as Chris Keating of the Hartford Courant reported the other day, those salaries have increased by more than 30%, more than private-sector salaries have increased, since Ned Lamont became governor in 2019.

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The average state employee salary, the newspaper said, is now about $95,000, which doesn’t include the value of the gold-plated medical insurance and the armor-plated job security enjoyed by state employees.

But Lamont is a Democrat, and just as no Roman emperor dared to reduce the pay of his legions, no Democratic governor dares to reduce the pay of his party’s legions, the state employee unions. Lamont already has pledged to give the unions 4.5% raises this year, a state election year. That will be more than enough to insure that union members use some of their many paid days off to work for Democratic campaigns. This kickback is Connecticut’s biggest public campaign financing program, completely one-sided.

What’s more disgraceful is that the governor just shrugs at the many particular excesses in state government’s payroll and work rules, like the guarantee to state employees that they can work many days from home each week, a guarantee with substantial cash value since it sharply reduces employee commuting expense.

The governor says he wants state employees to come back to their offices but notes that a 2021 labor contract arbitration decision concluded that working from home is a negotiated benefit and can’t be changed without the agreement of the unions.

Of course the governor knows that the arbitration decision is not really the last word. He and the General Assembly could remove working from home as a subject of contract negotiation and reclaim for the governor the power to designate workplaces. They could even repeal binding arbitration. While such legislation might require of the governor and most legislators more respect for the public interest than they have ever summoned, at least theoretically it could be done.

Other state employment excesses recently enumerated by the Courant include state employee overtime and pensions. 

Overtime long has been out of control and now is approaching $400 million per year, being worst in the Correction Department, the Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services, and the state police. Many state employees earn more in overtime than in base salary. 

In 2024 about 20 made more than $200,000 in overtime, about 1,700 made more than $50,000 in OT, and about 2,600 earned more than $40,000 in OT.

Most state employees love the option to work overtime and no one in authority wants to attempt the simple management necessary to minimize it. There’s no penalty for its excessive use.

Many retired state employees now are receiving annual pensions of $200,000 or more, and as Connecticut columnist Red Jahncke has often noted, the constant raises for state employees drive up the state’s pension obligations as well, devouring most of the extra money state government lately has been putting into state pension funds to improve their solvency. The extra money really hasn’t purchased much more solvency.

The leader of the Republican minority in the state House of Representatives, Vincent Candelora of North Branford, possibly the most sensible state legislator, proposes that state pensions should be capped at $100,000 or $150,000 annually. Such an amount still would provide comfortable retirement, quite apart from personal savings and any Social Security benefits state employees had happened to earn.  

“Affordability” has become the big buzzword in politics in Connecticut and nationally but it isn’t yet being applied to state government. For as H.L. Mencken wrote a century ago, if an elected official found that he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner. Since, on the whole, Connecticut’s taxpayers don’t pay much attention to state government, they remain the specialty on its menu.

—–

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

-END-

Mayor panders to the mob, inviting more insurrection

By CHRIS POWELL

If the country is in big trouble, it’s not just because the president pretends he has authority to wage war wherever he wants. It’s also because the country is full of people who are striving to obstruct immigration law enforcement, full of people who hallucinate that the government is getting ready to kill them, and full of elected officials who pander to both groups.

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Among those officials now is Hartford Mayor Arunan Arulampalam, who last week blamed the president and Immigration and Customs Enforcement for the conflict that occurred during a protest outside the federal building in Hartford, where ICE has an office.

Some protesters went behind the building and blocked the garage exit as two vehicles, presumably operated by ICE agents, were leaving. Video shows at least one protester in front of and leaning on an exiting car. Witnesses say someone, presumably an ICE agent, pepper-sprayed the blockaders and then the two cars made their way out by pushing through the mob, with a protester being knocked over but not injured.

The incident was the protesters’ fault, not ICE’s, just as the fatal incident in Minneapolis last week was caused by people who also set out to impede an enforcement operation.

At a press conference the day after the Hartford incident, Mayor Arulampalam called it “the direct result of the lawlessness and recklessness of the Trump administration.” Oh, sure — Trump and ICE made those protesters block the garage, and the ICE agents were wrong to try the clear the exit so they could do their work, though they are federal police officers just like FBI agents and impeding them is a federal felony.

With the mayor declaring that the work of the immigration agents is illegitimate, more criminal interference with ICE may be expected in Connecticut, at least until the FBI and local police make some arrests.

This doesn’t mean that the fatal shooting of the protester by the ICE agent in Minneapolis was justified, though it may have been. It means that she and her friends were not just protesting peacefully but seeking confrontation and interfering, just like the protesters at the Hartford federal building garage.

This distinction was lost on the people who held other protests in Connecticut last weekend — and lost on the journalists who interviewed them without posing critical questions.

A protester from Fairfield said, “It feels like it could happen to anyone now,” though “it” doesn’t seem to have happened to anyone not impeding or caught up in an ICE enforcement operation.

A protester from Stratford concurred, saying, “I don’t know who among us is safe,” though no one at her protest was attacked either.

Critical questions being out of fashion in journalism in Connecticut, no one seems to have asked the protesters just what, if anything, should be done about the illegal immigration that has overwhelmed the country. But questions should have been prompted by the signs the protesters carried, which called for ICE to be abolished or banished from Connecticut. 

So should there be no immigration law enforcement?

That’s the implication of the slogan on many other protest signs: “No human is illegal.” But that’s a straw man; no one has made such a silly claim. What’s illegal is the presence in the country of people who have not been properly admitted after a background check. The sanctimony of this slogan seems to advocate a return to open borders.

ICE needs closer supervision and Congress should require it. As with regular police officers, agents making arrests should always be identified by badges and name tags and should not be masked. As with ordinary arrests, detainees should be promptly identified on public registers so press and public can keep track of them.

But as with regular police officers, ICE agents may be more sinned against than sinning, as they are sometimes assaulted by their desperate targets and protesters. People who impede them are insurrectionists as much as the January 6 rioters at the U.S. Capitol were.

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

Minneapolis incident distracts from the big underlying issues

By CHRIS POWELL

Seven years ago a Wethersfield police officer shot and killed a motorist who drove straight at him after evading a traffic stop. While police video of the incident indicated that the officer could have gotten out of the way in time and didn’t have to stand his ground, the state’s attorney concluded that the shooting was justified because the officer reasonably feared for his life.

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If those who already have decided that the immigration agent who last week shot and killed a woman at an enforcement scene in Minneapolis was wrong — among them Mayor Jacob Frey, Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont and Attorney General William Tong, and most other Democratic officials — and those who already have decided that the agent was right — among them President Trump, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and most Republican officials — will drop their partisan hysteria and let the issue be decided through regular legal procedure, it likely will hinge on the standard in the Wethersfield case. 

That is, did the agent reasonably fear for his life?

Video of the Minneapolis incident suggests that the driver, leaving the scene, was trying to turn enough to avoid striking the agent, but her car may have touched him. It was close. The agent might or might not have had time to jump aside, but he might not have been obliged to.

The video also shows that the driver had parked her car sideways across both lanes of the street, blocking traffic; that she refused an order to get out of the car; and that she was trying to avoid apprehension — just like the driver shot and killed in Wethersfield seven years ago.

The driver in Minneapolis and many others on the scene seem to have been trying to obstruct immigration law enforcement. The New York Post reports that the driver was a member of a group that does just that. If she was looking for trouble, she found it.  

As for the immigration agent, if he was too fast on the draw, in a previous enforcement action he had been dragged and injured by the car of another fleeing motorist. Of course this might have affected his judgment of what constitutes reasonable self-defense, and in turn might affect a jury’s judgment, though as a “sanctuary city” Minneapolis might not be able to supply an impartial jury.

Sad as the Minneapolis incident is, it shouldn’t distract from the big underlying issues — whether federal immigration law is to be enforced, whether the country is to have open borders again as under the previous national administration, and whether states can nullify federal law. Until recently the latter issue had been thought settled since Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox in 1865 and again since the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and ’60s.  

Mayor Frey and the immigration law enforcement protesters in Minneapolis, Connecticut, and elsewhere explicitly favor nullification. Their signs call for abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement and prohibiting deportations, and they even carry the flags of other countries. Making himself even more vulgar than the president he detests, the mayor used an obscenity on national television as he proclaimed that he wanted ICE to get out of his city, as if it could secede.

Connecticut’s Democratic officials are barely more subtle. The General Assembly and governor keep enacting laws to hinder immigration law enforcement in the state.

Responding to the Minneapolis incident, Connecticut U.S. Rep. John B. Larson said he would introduce legislation “allowing states to prevent ICE from operating in their borders without full coordination with state and local law enforcement agencies.” 

“Full coordination”? Connecticut law prohibits it, and officials in the state’s “sanctuary cities” surely would betray ICE enforcement actions to local illegals. The nullifiers would love that.

Connecticut U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal wants to provide all illegal immigrants with a “path to citizenship” — a euphemism for another mass amnesty.

It’s crazy but maybe anything can happen politically now that the cause of open borders has gained a martyr.

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

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)