Chris Powell column

By Chris Powell

Because of the First Amendment, anyone in the United States can be a journalist at any time — no training or licensing required. Because of Connecticut’s Freedom of Information Act, everyone has access to state and municipal government proceedings and records, with narrowly defined exceptions, though government officials and employees are always trying to add more.

The citizen journalism facilitated by these rights can be a great thing. It also can be as empty as professional journalism can be.

That’s the lesson of the people who lately have been carrying mobile phone or video cameras into town halls in Connecticut to record municipal employees at work. This has annoyed and disconcerted some of them. Recently at Ridgefield Town Hall an offended employee swatted a videographer with a file folder and was charged with disorderly conduct and placed on administrative leave. But since no real harm was done, the charge was dropped and she returned to work a week later.

As long as they are not otherwise disruptive, the people with the video cameras are within their rights. But they are accomplishing little, since gaining access to municipal government buildings during business hours has not been a problem. Someday an unexpected videographer may catch a government employee sleeping at his desk, but that can happen anywhere.

Apparently in an attempt to make himself seem relevant, a videographer who walked through Town Hall in Sherman the other day eventually went into the town clerk’s office to ask for a list of all Town Hall employees, their job titles, and salaries. That is all public information and probably will be provided quickly enough, but will the videographer discover and publicize anything improper or questionable about the information? That’s not likely. He probably will content himself with whatever annoyance he caused.

But no cameras are necessary to extract from town or state government information whose disclosure may be of great public interest.

For example, instead of asking for a list of town government employees, titles, and salaries, someone might ask for access to all records of employee evaluation, discipline, and reprimand. Such records are useful for evaluating management in government. Even if there were no such records, townspeople might want to know that their local government workforce is perfect, or perfectly unmanaged.

As is suggested by controversies around the country, no one needs a camera to visit a public school superintendent’s office and ask for access to all curriculum materials and school library books. Like the rest of government, public schools often do things they don’t want the public to know about.

Connecticut’s public schools are so insistent about concealing what they do that they have gained an exemption to the freedom-of-information law authorizing them to keep teacher evaluations secret, even as disclosure remains required for evaluations of all other state and municipal government employees.

Public schools in Connecticut are special. That is, not really public.

Even if the objective of the videographers is only to annoy and disconcert government officials, such requests for information would annoy and disconcert those officials far more.

Indeed, that kind of citizen journalism might be superior to some professional journalism still being performed in Connecticut, journalism that is much reduced amid the state’s decline in literacy and civic engagement. Shared with news organizations, such citizen journalism might gain a large audience and thereby bolster government’s incentive to do better.

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HAPPY TO LAG: In its recent election Connecticut repudiated Donald Trump and most candidates associated with his political party, the Republicans, and swept Democrats back into full control of state government.

Yet the U.S. Census Bureau reported the other day that Connecticut had the country’s second-lowest population growth in 2022, an increase of only 2,800 people, or 0.08%, leading only Vermont, another Democratic state, whose population rose by just a tenth of a percent. Meanwhile the nation’s population increased by 0.38%.

Population growth is a measure of a state’s attractiveness. Connecticut seems happy to be a leading laggard.

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Chris Powell (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com) is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut.

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By Chris Powell

Connecticut’s terrible shortage of housing isn’t just impoverishing and putting great stress on thousands of people. It’s killing people too.

The shortage is enabling unscrupulous landlords to rent substandard, overcrowded, and illegal rooms and apartments and causing desperate people to take them. According to the Connecticut Examiner, last year a man living in an illegal basement apartment in Stamford was killed by carbon monoxide from an unvented water heater illegally installed in the apartment’s bathroom.

The Examiner says another Stamford resident died when he fell from the ladder that was his access to an illegal apartment in an attic.

Police say Stamford is full of illegal apartments sustained by the housing shortage. A leading Connecticut housing advocate says authorities can be reluctant to act against such apartments for fear that their tenants will be left on the street.

Hartford, New Haven, and other municipalities are undertaking or considering stricter enforcement of housing codes. But even some tenants who suffer from wretched conditions understand that stricter enforcement will lead to many evictions, and a wretched apartment is still better than the street.

Meanwhile Connecticut is full of vacant commercial real estate and office buildings with empty space as more employees work from home. Many former church buildings also are empty and available for repurposing.

Some municipal governments, like those in Hartford and New Haven, are encouraging housing construction and conversions to mixed commercial and residential use. But those are long-term projects, even as the illegal and dangerous apartments suggest Connecticut needs many more housing units immediately.

The state’s 169 municipalities will not work together to facilitate housing creation. But state government, flush with emergency federal money, is empowered and equipped to create housing where it is most needed, even if it is just to turn empty retail, office, and church space into temporary shelters.

Many initiatives will be proposed for state government in the new session of the General Assembly, but the most important should be to relieve the housing shortage with thousands of units, if only temporary ones, to be completed [ITALICS] this year. [END ITALICS]

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HUNT BOBCATS TOO: Now that bears have become ubiquitous in Connecticut and increasingly break into houses, damage property, and cause human activity generally to be suspended while they wander along, this might be the year when state government gets real about them. A bear-hunting season should be enacted, if only in the northwest part of the state, through which most bears enter.

During his re-election campaign Governor Lamont endorsed such legislation, so the big question is whether a majority of state legislators keep being cowed by the bear lobby, which is small but ferocious.

As shown by an incident at a farm in Marlborough on the day after Christmas, Connecticut should authorize hunting of bobcats as well. A bobcat broke through the window of a pen and slaughtered the 25 ducks inside but was unable to get back out. While the law entitled the farm owners to shoot the predator, they instead were persuaded to recruit a trapper to catch and relocate it. This was a mistake, since the bobcat may go on to attack someone else’s livestock or pets.

There is no good reason for state law to protect predators of domestic animals. Bobcats are stealthy and smart, and even with a hunting season, Connecticut isn’t likely to get rid of them. Reducing the damage they do is the most that can be hoped for.

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KILLING COMPETITION: Why were Connecticut’s liquor stores closed on New Year’s Day? While it was a Sunday, in recent years the law has allowed liquor stores to open on Sundays.

State law requires liquor stores to close on New Year’s Day not to serve any public interest but because most store operators want to be able to close without suffering competition from stores that would stay open if allowed.

So the liquor stores have induced state government to defeat their competition for them, just as they have induced state government to legislate minimum prices for their products. The liquor lobby is even more ferocious than the bear lobby and terrifies state legislators almost as much as the government employee unions do.

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Chris Powell (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com) is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut.

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By Chris Powell

Congress occasionally does investigations that take testimony in public and produce important information, expose scandal, and lead to policy changes. But the General Assembly never does. It eliminated its Program Review and Investigations Committee years ago.

While the legislature holds public hearings to gather comment on proposed legislation, these aren’t investigations. No one is subpoenaed and all testimony is volunteered by people pressing their point of view.

This lack of curiosity about the many discreditable happenings in the state may be a consequence of Connecticut’s longstanding one-party government. When the governor and the majority in the legislature are from the same party, there is little incentive to review anything that might embarrass the regime.

But state and municipal government are full of things deserving investigation by the legislature. A few months ago the overspending and even corruption in the New London State Pier project deserved a legislative investigation but it was foreclosed by Governor Lamont’s campaign for re-election.

Now the murder of Julie Minogue in Milford on Dec. 6, allegedly by the former boyfriend who long had been harassing her in violation of a protective order, practically screams for a legislative investigation. The woman called on Milford police to arrest her tormentor but the arrest was botched. The police prepared a warrant, a prosecutor quickly found it inadequate and returned it for elaboration, and weeks passed without additional action. Why? Maybe someone in authority will answer, or maybe not.

In any case protective orders for endangered women are little protection. They are mere disguises for government’s failure to act. State government refuses to provide the only thing that can protect endangered women: prompt prosecution.

The General Assembly’s public safety and judiciary committees should undertake a public investigation of the Minogue case to show what happened and fix responsibility, and then invite testimony about other failures of the criminal-justice system to respond quickly in domestic violence cases.

Then, if the committees are not too exhausted by the relevance of real life, the investigation could continue into the criminal-justice system’s failure to deal effectively with repeat offenders. Many terrible crimes in Connecticut are committed by people with extensive records who nevertheless were not imprisoned for long, if at all, even as some elected officials lately have boasted about the decline in the state’s prison population.

The tougher laws often advocated by legislators mean little if they are not enforced promptly, and they usually are not. Legislative investigation of the failure to protect endangered women and to put repeat offenders away for good might shock the public into demanding more than the usual posturing.

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EXPLOITING THE CARIBBEAN: Like many school systems, especially in other cities, Hartford’s is having trouble filling teaching positions, largely because so many students are impoverished and neglected at home, and, when they arrive at school, when they show up at all, are indifferent and not ready to learn. Meanwhile many of the city’s better students are siphoned away to regional “magnet” schools.

Few people want to teach where students don’t want to learn and often misbehave. This problem isn’t happening just in cities anymore but throughout the country as student performance and behavior decline generally.

So Hartford is expanding its program of recruiting teachers from the Caribbean. Having begun with Puerto Rico, whose residents are U.S. citizens, the program is seeking teachers from other islands and already has recruited four from the Dominican Republic.

Since so many Hartford students are of Puerto Rican or Latin American ancestry, school officials and Mayor Luke Bronin think it’s great that the city’s students may see more teachers who “look like them” and have similar backgrounds. As a result, maybe the students will be more engaged.

Certainly in Hartford the recruits from the Caribbean will receive far higher salaries and benefits than they could receive at home.

But it’s still as if the Caribbean countries, which are even more impoverished than Hartford, don’t need their own teachers just as much.

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Chris Powell (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com) is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut.

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By Chris Powell

New Haven’s school system is a catastrophe and getting worse, according to presentations made at a Dec. 20 meeting in the city that was called by state legislators and featured analysis from the state Education Department.

The meeting’s nominal purpose was to let the city’s Board of Education know that the state department is available to help, as if anybody didn’t know that already. The meeting’s real purpose seems to have been to tell the city school board that the catastrophe over which it has been presiding is getting harder for state government to overlook.

According to a report in the New Haven Independent, the state education officials said the proficiency of New Haven students used to be better than that of students in Connecticut’s other cities but now is the worst, and that the rate of chronic absenteeism of students in New Haven’s schools stands at 45%.

As many as 80% of New Haven’s students perform below grade level in either English or math or both, a polite way of saying that social promotion, a policy decision, has corrupted the entire school system.

Do school administrators not understand that this policy tells students there is no [ITALICS] need [END ITALICS] for them to perform or even attend — that they will be promoted from grade to grade and graduated from high school even if they learn nothing?

The meeting discussed the causes of chronic absenteeism without ever acknowledging social promotion’s powerful disincentive to go to school, and hardly noticed that the overwhelming cause of chronic absenteeism is simply the failure of parents, so-called, to ensure that their children show up.

That is, chronic absenteeism is just another pathology of government-subsidized poverty. So New Haven’s schools may hire more “drop-out prevention specialists” to coax the chronic absentees to come back. No penalties for negligent parents are contemplated, though many are on welfare.

But the meeting also produced a glimmer of hope. New Haven state Sen. Martin M. Looney, the Senate’s president pro tem, implied a growing suspicion even among liberals that throwing ever-more money at New Haven’s schools has failed to produce education.

Speaking for the city’s state legislative delegation, Looney said: “We’re concerned about making sure there’s transparency and a general understanding about the amounts of money New Haven has been receiving over the past few years. To be in a strong position to continue our advocacy for our own schools, we need to have a strong sense of exactly where we are going” when the new legislative session begins.

Meanwhile, the Independent reported, the city’s schools are sitting on more than $67 million in emergency aid from the federal government. If past is prologue, all of it will be spent without improving student performance, used instead just to give the impression that government is doing something about the catastrophe when all it is doing is helping itself avoid the awful truth: that education’s prerequisite is not money at all but parenting, which is collapsing everywhere, if more so in the cities, and that the most urgent reform for all schools is to discern why.

Chronic absenteeism in New Haven’s schools isn’t entirely a problem of students. The Dec. 20 meeting was told that the schools have about 130 vacant “classroom-facing” staff positions that are proving extremely difficult to fill. While the schools are planning to raise teacher salaries substantially under a new union contract, will it be enough to entice people to take a job with so many students who, neglected at home, are alienated and disengaged?

Social disintegration is causing similar problems with the state police and municipal police departments in Connecticut. Who wants to be a cop amid this disintegration?

The new state police contract is sharply increasing starting pay in the hope of boosting recruitment, especially from municipal departments. But city departments already have been losing officers to departments in suburbs where pay is higher and crime lower.

The new contract may rescue the state police at additional damage to city police departments. Then what?

Maybe state government should take over both city school systems and police departments. At least then political responsibility and blame would fall where it belongs, at the top.

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Chris Powell (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com) is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut.

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By Chris Powell

While the worst of the recent virus epidemic is long past, chronic absenteeism has been soaring in Connecticut’s schools, in cities and suburbs alike, signifying the worsening impoverishment of the population even as the state just went through an election campaign in which the winners insisted that the state is enjoying prosperity.

The absenteeism problem isn’t like the problem of old, with children leaving home but not showing up at school, or getting to school but skipping out early, “playing hooky.” Instead most of today’s absenteeism seems to happen with the knowledge or resignation of overwhelmed, demoralized, or indifferent single parents.

An aggressive response to the problem is being made by an elementary school in Hartford, where, on Wednesdays, which are only half days for classes, if a student isn’t in school on time, staffers call his home to see if he would like to be met and walked to school by a staffer. The practice, called the Walking School Bus, is said to have reduced chronic absenteeism by 10% — not much, but something.

In the old days making sure that one’s children got to school each day was considered a basic obligation of parenthood, and failure was considered child neglect. It also was considered basic decency not to have children before one was prepared to support them.

But as the Walking School Bus program indicates, child neglect today is increasingly accommodated by government, and the more children are neglected at home, the more services government provides them and their parents — without insisting on more responsibility from the parents.

The more that child neglect is accommodated by government, the more incentive parents are given to neglect their children. That is why the rise of single parenting and child neglect correlates so strongly with the rise of welfare benefits for single parents — powerful and perverse incentives for men to abandon the women they impregnate and the children they father, and for those women not to protect themselves against such betrayal.

The premise of government’s perverse incentives here is that it is both cheaper and better to leave children with neglectful parents than for government to take custody of them and raise them in foster or group homes.

This premise is contradicted by the continuing collapse of student proficiency in Connecticut and throughout the country, the persistence of juvenile crime, the growing number of uneducated and unskilled young adults stuck in menial jobs, the inability of employers to fill positions requiring skills, and worsening income inequality.

Of course no matter how children are domiciled, government must ensure that they are protected — fed, housed, and given medical care — and by government itself if their parents fail. But rather than keep adding to its perverse incentives for child neglect, Connecticut could do what jurisdictions elsewhere are doing or considering — conditioning welfare benefits on the recipients’ getting their children to school. People who can’t accomplish that are not fit to be parents, and their children should be put into foster care or group homes.

More accommodation of child neglect is signified by the “baby bonds” Connecticut is undertaking to provide and Massachusetts may provide soon.

“Baby bonds” have state government appropriating and putting money aside in special investment accounts for poor children when they are born, with the money made available to them upon their majority for spending on higher education, starting a business, and similar things.

The premise with “baby bonds” is that many parents won’t take care of their children with their own savings or life insurance.

Another premise is that upon reaching adulthood neglected children will know how to handle money and not spend their inheritance from state government recklessly, as by enrolling in college and then dropping out. (Since higher education is so overpriced and many college degrees so overrated, “baby bonds” for higher education are really subsidies for [ITALICS] educators [END ITALICS] instead.)

The “baby bonds” concept recognizes that everyone should enter adulthood with a little capital and credit. But the concept fails to recognize that the most crucial capital is a decent upbringing by competent parents. Assuring better parenting for children would achieve far more than “baby bonds.”

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Chris Powell (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com) is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut. 

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By Chris Powell

With an extension of one of his epidemic-related emergency orders, Governor Lamont has saved for another six months the Pacific House homeless shelter in Danbury, just days before it would have had to close because of the expiration of his previous order and the city zoning board’s disgraceful refusal to approve the facility.

Thus Connecticut has just barely avoided being shamed by the expulsion of dozens of people into the dead of winter during Christmas week, what would have been a grotesque re-enactment of there being “no room at the inn” as there famously was no room two millennia ago.

But of course the shame may be only postponed. While in the last few years state government sharply reduced homelessness, in recent months it has been rising again as the economy has weakened, inflation has soared, and the poorest and most troubled and demoralized have been most battered.

Getting them out of the cold and into a safe, secure, and warm environment with access to medical care and encouragement is again an urgent obligation for state government, even as practically every day state government touts its comfortable financial condition and bestows money on far less compelling projects.

With the new session of the General Assembly convening in a few days, the governor’s extended order preserving the Danbury shelter should be only the start of an emergency program to establish more shelters and supportive housing facilities throughout the state and to exempt them from municipal zoning regulations.

With organized religion declining, Connecticut abounds in empty church buildings, some of which are being offered for sale and repurposing, even if repurposing a building with a steeple may create a permanent incongruity for the new occupants.

Organized religion’s decline is not just a decline in theology and doctrine but also a decline in community, which can be seen in the worsening social disintegration generally. While in the old days religion could be politically divisive, in recent years in Connecticut it has stressed decency more than doctrine and so should be much missed.

In pursuit of that decency maybe state government should lease some of those former churches for use as shelters and supportive housing, and maybe the neighbors, in danger of being rebuked by the antique architecture for any lack of hospitality, would’’t object.

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EXPECT MORE FRAUD: A congressional district on Long Island that includes part of the New York City borough of Queens has just elected as U.S. representative a Republican whose resume, the New York Times reported the other day, is completely phony.

The representative-elect turns out not to be what he claimed during his campaign — a great scholar with a brilliant record in the financial industry — but a grifter who fled criminal prosecution in Brazil and has been evicted from apartments in New York for not paying rent.

Of course he should resign his office, and if he refuses, the House of Representatives should expel him. There should be a new election in his district. But even then the country should expect a lot more of this fraud, for it is the consequence of the decline of journalism, which in turn is a consequence of the decline of literacy and civic engagement throughout the country.

After all, creditable as the Times’ exposure of the grifter is, where were the newspaper and other news organizations purporting to serve Queens and Long Island [ITALICS] before [END ITALICS] his election?

Of course the Times was tediously savaging Donald Trump long after his presidential term had ended, just as most major news organizations were doing. For the Times declines to cover its own neighborhood seriously.

Connecticut has no cause to snicker here. While all the members of the state’s congressional delegation who were just re-elected have had long careers in public life and have been fully vetted, as Governor Lamont, also just re-elected, has been, the three new state constitutional officers remain almost completely unknown, and the backgrounds of many new state legislators just elected have not been scrutinized independently by vigorous journalism. For there isn’t much left.

The new constitutional officers and state legislators may turn out all right. But there is no longer much insurance anywhere against disasters like the one on Long Island.

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Chris Powell (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com) is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut.

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By Chris Powell

Why is there such support in the General Assembly for exempting retirement income from the state income tax?

Social Security and pension income is already exempt from the state income tax for single filers with incomes less than $75,000 and couples with incomes less than $100,000, and state Sen. Cathy Osten, D-Sprague, proposes to exempt [ITALICS] all [END ITALICS] retirement income.

The idea is that exempting all retirement income will encourage retirees to stay in Connecticut instead of moving to warmer and income-tax-free states like Florida and Texas. But of course such a rationale could apply to [ITALICS] all [END ITALICS] taxpaying Connecticut residents. It is a rationale for repealing the state income tax entirely.

Other than their potential to constitute another special interest for politicians to pander to and draw campaign contributions from, what makes retirees so deserving of favor? Income is income, whether derived from wages, savings, investments, pensions, or Social Security, and federal and state policy, pursuing fairness, long has imposed progressive taxation on most income — that is, higher rates on higher incomes.

So why should someone in Connecticut with $200,000 in retirement income pay less in income tax than someone with only $75,000 in wage income? While many retirees are poor, progressivity in income taxation protects them just as it protects all poor people, even as older people are the wealthiest age demographic in the country, many owning their homes free and clear, having discharged their mortgages.

Meanwhile younger people may have rent or mortgages to pay and children to raise — the taxpayers of the future.

Connecticut can respect its elders without disparaging everybody else.

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VINDICATE FREE EXPRESSION: Another culture-war case from Colorado has reached the Supreme Court, as an internet site designer is defying the state’s anti-discrimination law by refusing to design a site for a same-sex wedding. The designer contends that same-sex marriage contradicts his religious beliefs and that compelling him to design a site for it violates his First Amendment freedom of expression.

The Supreme Court’s conservative majority seems inclined to rule for the designer. Though claims of freedom of expression used to be supported by the political left, the left now advocates ever more compulsion by government and suppression of dissent, and so is predicting disaster if religious objections trump anti-discrimination law.

But there really doesn’t seem to be much danger here. If the First Amendment exempts creative expression services from anti-discrimination law, such an exemption could not plausibly be claimed for anything else. No one is likely to get away with refusing to sell toothpaste or cereal to anyone on account of sexual orientation, race, or other characteristics protected by law. Nor, these days, are many merchants and service providers likely to want to forfeit such sales.

Besides, other than those trying to annoy their ideological adversaries, who would really want the creative services of someone whose heart wasn’t in the work?

No one will have any trouble finding a designer for a same-sex wedding’s internet site if the designer in Colorado is allowed to follow both his profession and his conscience.

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ANOTHER FOREVER WAR?: How do Americans think the war between Russia and Ukraine should end? More important, how much are Americans willing to pay to achieve that end?

For like most wars, this one will end when the money and resources for it run out, and Ukraine will be able to pursue its maximalist objectives — like return of the Crimea — only if the United States and Western Europe keep supplying unlimited military equipment and cash.

Russia already had seized the Crimea before the war began, and Ukraine and the rest of the world were living with it. That annexation by Russia, like Russia’s recent annexation of Ukraine’s eastern provinces, constituted aggression against a member of the United Nations, but the U.N. is doing nothing about it.

So how much more war, and more risk of a wider war, do Americans want to pay for? Do they want another forever war like Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, or a realistic settlement? Exactly what are America’s war aims? Americans should demand that the president and Congress tell them.

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Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut. (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com)

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By Chris Powell

Frank Capra’s 1946 film, “It’s a Wonderful Life,” to be broadcast again tonight at 8 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.

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, ruthless landlord, and board member, played by Lionel Barrymore, proposes dissolving the Building & Loan, and his callousness angers Bailey’s elder son, George, played earnestly by Jimmy Stewart, who has been working as assistant to his father.

[BEGIN ITALICS]

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. …

[END ITALICS]

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 a few 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 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 [ITALICS] after [END ITALICS] Christmas, the question of how things can be organized to ensure that everyone has a good chance to earn his way in decency. But the great joy of Christmas is that the answer has been given, that we are [ITALICS] not [END ITALICS] lost, that the country has been shown the way and can recover it — that society [ITALICS] can [END ITALICS] work for all, that it really [ITALICS] can [END ITALICS] be a wonderful life if enough selfless people make it a political one.

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Chris Powell (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com) is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Conn.

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By Chris Powell

Was Governor Lamont serious the other day when he said, as he had said during his campaign for re-election, that he wants to repeal the part of the state’s gun law permitting people to keep the military-style rifles they owned before the state banned their possession and sale?

The governor, a Democrat, might not have much support for such an initiative in his own party in the General Assembly. New Haven Sen. Gary Winfield is skeptical. Betraying the assurances that were made to rifle owners to pass the original legislation would be a problem, Winfield told the Connecticut Mirror. While the senator is no partisan of gun rights, he agrees with gun rights advocates who note that gun crime almost always involves handguns and rarely involves military-style rifles or any rifles at all.

Rifles “grandfathered” by the law are registered with the state, making their use in crime even less likely. While the grandfathering doesn’t cover rifles that might be brought into the state by criminals, criminals wouldn’t be obeying any gun laws anyway and no Connecticut law is going to stop out-of-staters determined to commit crimes with such rifles here.

Then there would be the challenge of confiscating the rifles that have been grandfathered. The state police are already badly under strength, so would the governor send them knocking on the doors of the many thousands of registered rifle owners or going to court for search and seizure warrants and subpoenas?

Some rifle owners might grudgingly surrender their guns upon passage of such a law, but many also might hide them or move them out of state or claim to have done so, inviting state government to sue or prosecute them.

Some rifle owners might commence litigation themselves, especially since the U.S. Supreme Court has become more supportive of Second Amendment rights and the rifles at issue are widely owned nationally, strengthening a claim that the amendment protects their ownership, even in Connecticut.

The continuing obsession with military-style rifles on the political left serves as a distraction from state government’s ineffectiveness in the face of Connecticut’s worsening violent crime and social disintegration. At least as a matter of politics, doing something irrelevant may play better than doing nothing at all.

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Journalism today increasingly euphemizes to propagandize under cover of news reporting. The latest example seems to be the term “gender-affirming care,” which has replaced “sex-change therapy.” The old term is traditional, literal, apolitical, and accurate. The new term is politically correct but deliberately inaccurate to mislead.

For “gender-affirming care” would not be undertaken if people were not dissatisfied with the gender they already have and were not seeking to displace something bothering them.

“Gender-affirming care” is being used to pretend that gender has no physical manifestation and is entirely a state of mind that can be changed at will. That’s not true. Gender has physical and biological manifestations, and “gender-affirming care,” just like sex-change therapy, may involve both surgery and drugs that can cause irreversible physical and mental changes that people sometimes come to regret.

Erasing this aspect of sex-change therapy from the public mind seems to be the propagandistic intent of the euphemism — to give the impression that nothing questionable is going on, that all is sweetness and light, just ordinary medical care.

But that’s not true either. Sex-change therapy for minors is fairly challenged on the old principle that minors are not qualified to give consent to irreversible things and that certain things with minors should wait for them to achieve their majority.

There [ITALICS] is [END ITALICS] a serious argument here. But as various totalitarians are said to have observed, “If you label something well enough, you don’t have to argue with it or about it.”

George Orwell concurred in his dystopian novel “1984,” wherein a functionary of the totalitarian state remarks about the government’s comprehensive censoring of the language:

“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.”

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Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut. (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com)

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By Chris Powell

Having gathered hundreds of people at Weaver High School in Hartford the other night, the Greater Hartford Interfaith Action Alliance called for a state law to limit housing rent increases to 3% annually. This was presented as social justice. Like so much else presented as social justice, it was actually just pious posturing and, worse, scapegoating.

The presumption of the clergy group’s proposal is that landlords cause inflation and, because they cause it, they exclusively should bear its financial burdens — as if, amid inflation, a landlord’s costs for energy, employee wages and benefits, building services, and taxes don’t rise with everyone else’s.

Landlords don’t cause inflation. Inflation is caused largely by government when it increases the money supply out of proportion to the economy’s production of goods and services — which is of course exactly what the federal government has been doing in recent years, exploding the money supply while curtailing production or making it more expensive.

But the clergy group favors more and more government and isn’t likely to achieve its objective if it starts complaining about government’s responsibility for inflation. So the clergy group will blame landlords instead as then presume to teach the public about the morality required by God.

The clergy group didn’t stop with rent control. It also called on state government to spend hundreds of millions more dollars on city school systems in the name of improving education there, as if increasing spending on city schools hasn’t been Connecticut policy for almost 40 years without ever improving student performance. But calling for more government spending on education is a lot easier for the clergy members than telling their parishioners that the primary cause of educational failure is their own childbearing outside marriage and the resulting child neglect.

The clergy group’s third idea is to have state government spend another $20 million in the name of “violence prevention” programs, as if the violence and social disintegration that long have been worsening in the cities are not also consequences of family breakdown.

Religious vestments may inspire respect and even intimidate but they don’t substitute for critical thinking or vindicate scapegoating.

* * *

NO, HE’S NOT: Darien’s Board of Education thinks that reading “Julian Is A Mermaid” to second-graders, as recently was done at Royle Elementary School as part of the “social and emotional learning” curriculum, is necessary to teach tolerance. It’s not necessary at all. But it may be a good way of putting transgenderism into impressionable little minds that are easily confused.

The book tells the story of a little boy who sees a parade of female impersonators, wraps a curtain around his waist, and joins them in aspiration of becoming a sea creature of the other sex. Presumably the book was read to the second-graders in part because some cannot yet read themselves. If so, the problem is not exclusive to Darien, since this month the state education commissioner reported more scary details about the long collapse of student proficiency in Connecticut.

Kids can be cruel and so do need to be taught to behave decently. But teaching them does not require transgender metaphors. Instead schools can be frank and candid. Schools can tell students that Julian is [ITALICS] not [END ITALICS] a mermaid but is afflicted with gender dysphoria, an unfortunate mental condition, but that in a free country like theirs, people can be different in their personal lives, that in school these differences must be respected, and that students who taunt, bully, or belittle their classmates will be punished. (That is, required to spend hours being lectured by a diversity, equity, and inclusion social worker.)

Such a policy can be put in print and students can be given two copies and compelled to sign and return one to acknowledge their receipt and understanding of it — and then school staff can enforce it.

If that’s not enough for a school system, then the system has a sinister agenda and people should mobilize to change it.

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Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut. (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com)

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