Chris Powell: Innovation is needed to fight poverty and violence; Conn. customer satisfaction

The P.T. Barnum (the circus guy) Museum, in Bridgeport.

MANCHESTER, CONN.
Appalled by the shooting of five people in several incidents in Bridgeport over the Memorial Day weekend, Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont hurried to the city on May 28 to meet Mayor Joe Ganim and other officials and show moral support.

While Bridgeport's police department is said to be understaffed and to suffer high turnover -- police work may be easier almost anywhere else -- the governor didn't promise any extra help for the city. He thought state initiatives that are already underway with city government are enough for the time being. 

In contrast .Mayor Ganim thundered emptily for the television cameras that the city would ensure that the perpetrators of the weekend shootings and other shootings are punished severely. Of course they'll have to be apprehended first.

Just a few hours later four people were shot in an incident in Waterbury. This one didn't prompt a visit from the governor, as the daily business of state government had resumed with the governor's announcement of the allocation of $100 million to the state Economic and Community Development Department for establishing "innovation clusters." This is the euphemism for more political patronage dressed up as economic growth.  

If only one of those clusters could figure out how to end gun violence in the cities, or, better still, figure out how to reduce poverty in Connecticut. 

Most people in the state -- at least most of those who don't hold elective office -- have noticed that violent crime is closely correlated with poverty. So most people won't be surprised that three of the shootings that appalled the governor took place at the P.T. Barnum Apartments public housing project in Bridgeport and not in exclusive neighborhoods in Darien or Avon. This has been the way of life in Connecticut for many decades. 

Nor have the two major state government policies involving poverty changed over that time. Connecticut long has maintained a welfare system that subsidizes childbearing outside marriage and thus deprives children of fathers and the income, discipline, and guidance they provide. The state also long has promoted children throughout school even if they fail to learn anything, thereby destroying their incentive to learn.

These policies have delivered tens of thousands of young people to adulthood largely demoralized and unable to provide for themselves adequately. They are even less able to provide for themselves now that government-instigated inflation has sharply raised the price of necessities. In such circumstances people get stressed, alienated, angry, disturbed, and predatory.     

Announcing that $100 million for "innovation clusters," the governor said: "Connecticut has the best-educated and best-trained workforce in the nation. ... We are the home of innovation."

Maybe, but it wasn't the success of an educated and trained workforce that compelled the governor to rush to Bridgeport the other day. The visit was compelled by another deadly manifestation of the state's huge and growing underclass, which still gets no innovation from state government no matter how many lives are lost or damaged.

WE'RE NOT THAT BAD: According to Seattle-based survey firm Qualtrics, the services provided by Connecticut state government produce the second-worst customer satisfaction rate among the 50 states and the District of Columbia, with Connecticut's 51 percent rate leading only that of Illinois with 49 percent.

Are government services in Connecticut really that bad, or are the state residents who responded to the survey just more demanding and would find themselves even less satisfied if they lived elsewhere?

In any case, a customer-satisfaction rate as low as the one reported by the Qualtrics survey would suggest great political dissatisfaction too. But it's hard to find much evidence of that in Connecticut. For many years the same political party has controlled all major state and federal elective offices and has held comfortable majorities in the General Assembly. 

Political dissatisfaction? It's hard to find even political competition here.

Of course, some state agencies could be friendlier, but next-to-last in the country in customer satisfaction is almost impossible to believe.

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

Chris Powell: The wild ‘Kia Boyz’ may represent Conn.’s grim future

Downtown Bridgeport in 1912. Bridgeport was an industrial powerhouse for decades.

MANCHESTER, Conn.

What may prove to be Connecticut's best journalism for many years was a 44-minute video documentary of sorts posted last week on YouTube by freelancer Andrew Callaghan and brought to the state's attention by CTCapitolReport.com.

Callaghan gained the confidence of three teenage gangsters from Bridgeport and video-recorded them on their daily rampages -- breaking into and stealing cars day and night throughout the state, speeding away wildly along highways and residential streets, risking death and the death of others, defeating police pursuit, and boasting that no one can catch them.

Of course the young gangsters might be caught, insofar as Callaghan repeatedly located them and even joined them at a government housing project in Bridgeport, where, he found, stolen cars are regularly being "sold" to other young gangsters for a mere hundred dollars or so, the contents of the cars having more value than the cars themselves, which are soon abandoned since they can't be acquired legally.

Apparently the Bridgeport police were not yet aware of or interested in the use of the housing project as a stolen car market. Nor, apparently, was Mayor Joe Ganim, though his recent re-election campaign was noted for soliciting absentee ballots from public-housing residents who may have feared that keeping their apartments required such cooperation with the regime.

Despite the harm they were doing, the kids seemed more lost and nihilistic than evil, glad that someone from another world was paying attention to them. As they sat on the roof of a small abandoned house, taking a break from their mayhem, Callaghan even got them to reflect briefly on their lack of parenting and particularly their lack of present fathers.

The young gangsters call themselves the Connecticut Kia Boyz, since most of their target vehicles are Kias, which became notorious for the ease of bypassing their ignition systems with a screwdriver and USB cable.

It is hard not to see the Kia Boyz as the country's future -- the vanguard of the ever-growing urban underclass, products of the family-destroying welfare system; of schools that pay their employees well but fail to educate because they can't educate when their primary policy is social promotion and parents are no help; and of a criminal-justice system that pretends that social work actually works and is preferable to imprisoning young repeat offenders, giving them what feckless state legislators call "the help they need" without ever defining or delivering it.

What the Kia Boyz and the hundreds of thousands like them around the country need most is  parents. But no one in authority in Connecticut dares to inquire into what has happened to parents and particularly to fathers, and why. That's because such an inquiry might distress the many government employees and others who make their livings doing what doesn't work or even makes things worse.]

Anyone daring to inquire into the collapse of the family would also risk accusations of racism, since fatherlessness and poverty are racially disproportionate,.

So the country's nearly comprehensive abandonment of behavioral standards continues, worsened by the crushing pressure imposed on schools, hospitals, welfare agencies and government budgets by the millions of immigrants illegally entering the country in recent years.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the social scientist who became a great U.S. senator from New York, saw it all coming in the famous 1965 report that bears his name.

Moynihan wrote: "From the wild Irish slums of the 19th-century Eastern seaboard to the riot-torn suburbs of Los Angeles, there is one unmistakable lesson in American history: A community that allows a large number of men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future -- that community asks for and gets chaos. Crime, violence, unrest, disorder -- most particularly the furious, unrestrained lashing out at the whole social structure -- that is not only to be expected; it is very near to inevitable. And it is richly deserved."

Six decades later Moynihan's prophecy is still ignored even as new horrors fulfill it almost every day.

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

Chris Powell: If sex changes become routine, America will get even crazier

MANCHESTER, Conn.

According to an assistant secretary of the U.S. Health and Human Services Department, Rachel Levine, who spoke the other day at the Connecticut Children's Medical Center, in Hartford, "gender-affirming care" -- the euphemism for sex-change therapy -- will be common and considered normal before too long.

Levine may be right but no one should hope so.

For it would signify profound national unhappiness if many people were so uncomfortable in their own skin that they would want to undergo physique-altering drug treatments and even mutilation. The law should prohibit this kind of thing for minors, for the same reason that it prohibits minors from making contracts and should prohibit minors from marrying, as is increasingly being urged. Minors aren't prepared to make such decisions.

Children may grow out of gender dysphoria, as they grow out of many other things, and evidence that sex-change therapy increases the long-term happiness of those who undertake it is lacking, even as the therapy may have irreversible effects.

While it does not seem to have been noted, the rise in gender dysphoria among children corresponds with the explosion of mental illness generally among the young. This may not be a coincidence.

After all, about a third of children in the United States live in a home without two parents and thus with less parenting and support than most children used to get. Many of those children are living in poverty. In cities the percentage of children living in poverty without fathers approaches 90 percent.

Meanwhile, school performance is crashing throughout the country.

The explosion in youthful mental illness (and mental illness in the adult population as well) would seem to invite government to inquire urgently into its cause.

Indeed, the mental illness epidemic may be more damaging than the recent virus epidemic was. But no.

Instead Assistant Secretary Levine remarked in Hartford that sex-change therapy for minors has the "highest support" of the Biden administration.

If such an administration remains in power, the assistant secretary's prophecy that sex-change therapy for children will become normal could be self-fulfilling, whether such therapy is really needed or not and though the country won't be any saner for it.

xxx

MORE URGENT THAN BONUSES: While state government has begun paying $45 million in bonuses to 36,000 of its "essential" employees, a couple of sad news reports related to government finance were largely overlooked.

The housing authority in Bridgeport is evicting about a fifth of its households, 502 of 2,500, because they haven't been paying rent and are already about $1.5 million in arrears. In New Haven a longstanding camp of homeless people in a city park, considered a sanitation and fire hazard, was dismantled and bulldozed by city employees.

The city governments didn't mean to be cruel. They are striving to find other accommodations for the people being displaced, some of whom of course have drug and other mental problems. Even so, people living in a homeless camp are probably not in a condition to support themselves, just as people who can't cover the rent in government housing for the poor probably aren't either.

That doesn't mean that with some temporary support, rehabilitation, and training these people couldn't support themselves eventually, but their present is desperate. They need shelter immediately, and in Connecticut shelter is scarcer and more expensive than ever.

Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont is not indifferent to the problem. His administration has just given $2.45 million to Pacific House, a social-service organization that operates emergency shelters, to build 39 inexpensive apartments to become "supportive housing" in Stamford. But as the evictions in Bridgeport and New Haven show, that housing will not be nearly enough for immediate needs.

So Connecticut should consider opening a few emergency shelters such as the field hospitals the National Guard set up quickly during the COVID pandemic. Much vacant retail, school and church property might be adapted for this purpose. Of course, supervisory staff would have to be hired, and rules devised and enforced to keep the facilities clean and orderly, but such a project would not be complicated, except maybe for assuaging the neighbors.

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

Chris Powell: Rent-control bill a fraud; college-job racket; nimbys vs. Bridgeport

In a studio apartment.

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Nearly everyone agrees that Connecticut badly needs more inexpensive apartments. Many basic two-bedroom units in the state carry monthly rents that are as high as a home mortgage payment, and rents are still rising. As was demonstrated the other day at a state legislative committee hearing, many renters are desperate, especially with unprecedented electricity price increases coming on top of rent increases.

But no one has explained how a law restricting rents -- government price control that would be exclusive to housing even as the prices of all other necessities are rising sharply as well -- is going to encourage construction and renovation of rental housing. Indeed, with a rent-control law Connecticut may send a powerful signal to rental-housing developers to avoid the state and a powerful signal to landlords to convert their apartments to condominiums and sell them.

Rent control may help people who already have apartments but it won't increase supply or slake demand.

Fortunately the major rent-control legislation under consideration in the General Assembly is a fraud. It would restrict annual rent increases to 4 percent plus inflation. With the latest official U.S. inflation rate at 6.4 percent, the legislation would hardly cap rents at all. Its main value to its advocates may be to establish the principle of expropriating property without fair compensation.

Then, after a few years, other legislation might cap rent increases at 4 percent without an inflation adjustment, and then freeze rents entirely. After all, many advocates of rent control think that everything necessary should be free. Of course nothing is really free, and decisions about who should pay can be messy, since cost-shifting is such a big objective of government.

Many people oppressed by their rents aren't familiar with economics and how the real world works. But many advocates of rent control are, and they know exactly what they are doing and what they are not doing.

They are not encouraging the crowd to understand inflation and where it comes from -- government itself. They are not encouraging the crowd to notice that since most important prices have risen sharply, landlords aren't to blame.

Nor are the rent-control advocates concentrating on the only solution to rising rents: increasing housing supply. No, expropriating is their objective.

There are solutions to supply, but they aren't quick and easy.

Liberalizing municipal zoning is the one most discussed. But any zoning solution will be slow and disjointed.

State government could build housing directly, exempting itself from municipal zoning, using eminent domain to obtain land, hiring contractors, and assigning construction plans, but that would risk much corruption.

Or maybe state government could exempt itself from local zoning, use eminent domain to obtain property near water and sewer lines and transit infrastructure, put the properties out to bid to apartment developers, and then exempt them from taxes as long as the properties were well maintained.

Such a policy would be sounder environmentally and possibly less controversial than putting apartments in rural towns that lack infrastructure.

But there can be no substantial construction of housing anywhere without controversy. In the end the issue is a choice between the haves and have-nots. Government may try to mollify the have-nots with free bus rides, diapers, and contraceptives, but what they need most is less expensive housing.

* * *

In the meantime state government will continue to take care of itself better than anything else.

Central Connecticut State University, in New Britain, has just announced its hiring of former Hartford Democratic state Rep. Edwin Vargas as the new occupant of the Gov. William A. O'Neill Endowed Chair in Public Policy and Practical Politics. The job pays $69,000, pretty sweet for someone who is 74 with pension income. That’s "practical politics" for you.

Vargas won re-election last year but, betraying his constituents, declined to take office in January so he could accept the university job. His predecessor was another state legislator, former state Sen. Donald J. DeFronzo, a Democrat from New Britain.

If Republicans ever want to occupy an endowed chair in public higher education in Connecticut, they'll have to start winning a lot more elections.

View of Sikorsky Memorial Airport (left), the Housatonic River and Stratford. The airport is named for aviation pioneer Igor Sikorsky (1889-1972).

No place in Connecticut has as much untapped potential as its largest and most impoverished city, Bridgeport -- on Long Island Sound with a great harbor, superhighways leading to the east, west and north, a major stop on the Northeast Corridor railroad line, and a city-owned airport just over the municipal line in Stratford.

But state government long has overlooked Bridgeport's potential because no one in authority has dared to deal with the poverty of the city's residents.

Refurbishing the airport and restoring scheduled commercial flights there could contribute greatly to Bridgeport's revival and economic development. But predictably enough Stratford doesn't want to cooperate. Two of its state legislators, Republican Sen. Kevin Kelly and Democratic Rep. Joe Gresko, have introduced legislation to thwart Bridgeport's sale of Sikorsky to the Connecticut Airport Authority, essentially giving Stratford control of the airport, which would mean no improvement.

Bridgeport is too poor and ill-managed to restore Sikorsky itself. But it could be done by the airport authority, which has greatly improved Bradley International Airport in Windsor Locks. If Bridgeport is ever to be improved in any respect, state government will have to do it. Let it start with Sikorsky.

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

Chris Powell: Delinquent derelict’s family gets rich on the taxpayers

The Hollow neighborhood of Bridgeport, along North Avenue.

— Photo by Lima16

MANCHESTER, Conn.

What happens in Connecticut when a 15-year-old lives in a home with abusive and neglectful parents, drug abuse and violence, ends up on the street, joins his friends in car thefts, gets high on marijuana, steals another car, leads police on a chase, drives the wrong way on a one-way street, strikes other cars, is cornered in a parking lot, puts the car into reverse to escape, knocks over an officer, and is fatally shot by him?

In Connecticut what happens is that the boy's family, who messed him up, gets $500,000 from the City of Bridgeport to settle a lawsuit asserting that his death was actually a federal civil-rights violation.

This presumably will be the final chapter of the story of Jayson Negron, whose life ended in a fairly predictable way in 2017 and reflected the widespread neglect of Connecticut's children and the failure of government to do much about it.

Ironically, the settlement was approved by the Bridgeport City Council this week just as Connecticut, mourning two police officers murdered by a drunken madman in Bristol, sought to show support for police generally. Though the settlement falsely implied that the Bridgeport officer was in the wrong in the case of the young car thief, it did not provoke much comment around the state.

Neither side in the lawsuit wants to talk about the award. The City Council may have treated it as a nuisance settlement recommended by the city's insurer to avoid the risk that a judge or jury, sympathizing with the boy's survivors despite the facts, might produce an adverse verdict and a larger award.

But the officer who shot the boy had been fully vindicated by a state's attorney's investigation that, incidentally, showed that the boy's supporters, trying to provoke outrage, repeatedly lied when they claimed that the car the boy was driving was not stolen as police said it was.

Until recently Connecticut had been failing to exact the necessary accountability from its police officers. New law establishes the office of inspector general to investigate police use of force, curtails the immunity of officers from lawsuits, and prevents the state police from concealing complaints of misconduct. The new law is said to be demoralizing police, but then any greater accountability would. Accountability in government is a necessity and must take precedence over employee morale.

But the settlement of the lawsuit in Bridgeport was not a necessity but a convenience, an excuse for the city not to support its police when they are in the right and an excuse for government not to demand accountability from wrongdoers.

Jayson Negron became a danger to the public because his family catastrophically failed him. Now they're getting rich at public expense, some people will call it justice, and, in this age of political correctness, no one in authority will dare to contradict them.

The "justice for Jayson" for which the boy's defenders clamor would have been decent parents.

WHITHER COLUMBUS?

But there is also plenty of lawlessness on the official level in Bridgeport.

For two years Mayor Joe Ganim has been expropriating the statue of Christopher Columbus that stood at Seaside Park in the city, though, according to the city's legal department, the city's Parks Commission, which has been protesting the expropriation, is the statue's exclusive custodian.

It's not clear what the mayor wants to do with the statue. First he had it placed in a barn at the park and lately had it moved to an Italian social club.

Of course, the mayor may worry that the statue risks vandalism if it remains in a public place, just as Columbus statues in Waterbury and elsewhere have been vandalized by people who consider him an agent of brutal Spanish imperialism more than a daring and world-changing explorer. (Strange that the people who are so upset with Columbus that they vandalize his statues don't seem to have vandalized anything, or even protested, in regard to their own country's recent imperial adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan.)

In any case the Columbus statue in Bridgeport is for the Parks Commission to dispose. Expropriating and hiding it just avoids the decision that needs to be made in the open by the responsible agency.

The statue's expropriation also adds to Mayor Ganim's sorry record of lawbreaking.

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

Transgenderism craze is mangling language; lawyer joke in Bridgeport

Transgender pride flag

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Languages belong to those who use them. Dictionaries standardize language on the basis of prevailing usage. If users want to be clearly understood, they will follow those standards pretty closely.

But the transgenderism craze that is sweeping politically correct circles, which include many news organizations, is upending and mangling the English language here and there, especially in regard to pronouns.

People who don't want to be recognized by their biological genders, some of whom claim that there are many other genders, are clamoring for new pronouns and have devised more than 70. But it is hard to imagine that many people will take the time to learn them all, much less abase themselves by trying to use them when hardly anyone else will understand them either and when using them will imply that the user believes that there really are more than two biological genders.

The recently invented pronouns hamper rather than facilitate understanding. That may be why some gender deniers or concealers want to scrap the individual gender-specific pronouns "he" and "she" and be cited with the plural pronoun "they," English lacking a gender-neutral singular pronoun. But since "they" signifies plural, its use in regard to an individual is silly and can only cause confusion.

In a free country people are free to invent words and use euphemisms to advance their politics. Already in politically correct circles "illegal immigrants" have become "undocumented people," as if they inadvertently left their passports and visas at home before heading to the border. People undergoing sex-change surgery or therapy are said to be getting "gender-affirming care," as if they had no gender at birth. Homosexuals are now "men who have sex with men."

Maybe heterosexuals will become "people who have sex with people of a different gender."

But in a free country people also are free to reject using euphemisms for perfectly good words and phrases and to reject denial of biology.

Besides, it's simple to avoid mangling the language when dealing with people who don't want their gender presumed upon by pronouns. That is: Just avoid pronouns where people don't want "he" or "she" and, instead, use names repeatedly, making them possessive as necessary. It will sound awkward but will preserve clarity without offending anyone, even though people increasingly want to be offended, since it confers power over the easily intimidated.

Iranistan, the residence of circus impresario P. T. Barnum, in 1848. The circus continues in poor old Bridgeport.

Lawyer jokes may be the funniest, most cynical and most accurate about the human condition, and the material for another one is gathering in Connecticut's courts.

Bridgeport Mayor Joe Ganim is trying again to recover his license to practice law, which he lost in 2003 upon his conviction for 16 federal corruption felonies committed during his first term as mayor, for which he served seven years in prison before persuading the voters of Bridgeport to return him to the scene of the crimes.

Ganim's first request to get his law license back was approved by a court committee of lawyers in 2012 but rejected by a three-judge court, which disapproved because it felt that Ganim had not shown enough remorse.

At a hearing last week before another court committee of lawyers, Ganim was more contrite, if not necessarily sincere. So presumably his next committee of judges will reinstate him, as other felonious lawyers have been reinstated in recent decades.

But the previous practice of Connecticut's courts was better. In the old days a felony conviction was enough to disbar a lawyer for life, so as to maintain the honor of the courts and the honor of the office every lawyer holds, commissioner of the Superior Court.

After all, lawyers who commit crimes, especially crimes of corruption, know better, having taken the lawyer's oath to "do nothing dishonest."

The honor of Connecticut's courts and those who would practice law here is no longer so rigorously defended. As a result, corruption is increasingly suspected about courts and lawyers. So maybe it will be better if Ganim returns as a commissioner of the Superior Court and confirms the suspicion, the public's remaining illusions are shattered, the law and the legal business are covered with more shame, and some of those who continue in the business may be more motivated to try cleaning it up.\
xxx

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

Sterling Block-Bishop Arcade, a Victorian-era shopping arcade, in downtown Bridgeport.

Chris Powell: Amidst the failure to lift the poor, cities need gentrification

Approaching Wooster Square Park, in New Haven. The Wooster Street archway is decorated with a cherry blossom tree, a symbol of New Haven. It’s a reminder of the pleasure and advantages of city life, notes Chris Powell.

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Especially in Connecticut, elected officials claim credit for trying to solve the problems they themselves created. It happened again recently with legislation proposed in the General Assembly to require larger municipalities to create "fair rent" commissions with power to cancel or reduce residential rent increases.

Yes, along with housing prices generally, rents have been increasing dramatically since inflation exploded. By some calculations housing has never been more expensive relative to incomes. But the legislation effectively blamed landlords when the rent increases are largely the result of government's own policies.

Impairing the ability of landlords to make money would only discourage boosting the supply of rental housing.

Connecticut policy long has allowed municipal zoning regulations to stunt the housing supply. Like rent control, restrictive zoning subverts the market. If housing was easier to build, supply would grow and prices fall.

A recent state law aims to diminish the exclusivity of suburban zoning, but it is yet to have much effect even as it is prompting anger in some towns.

The housing shortage has bigger underlying problems.

First, people want to have children but don't want to ensure that housing is available nearby for their kids when they start out on their own. Of course, peace and quiet are great but many people want government to provide peace and quiet at the expense of people who don't yet have adequate housing -- to provide peace and quiet through restrictive zoning.

And second, people justifiably want good neighbors. Quite apart from racial and ethnic prejudices, which are fading, good neighbors means that people who will behave decently, pay more in taxes than they consume in government services, and not manifest the pathologies associated with the never-ending poverty and depravity of the cities.

Connecticut's zoning-reform legislation vindicates these concerns insofar as it calls itself "fair share" legislation, confirming that new residents are a burden. Once or twice even the mayors of Hartford and New Haven have been candid about wanting to disperse their poorest residents to the suburbs. Indeed, poverty is no virtue, for with the poor come crime, dependence, and neglected children who wreck schools.

Suburbs sneer at this while city mayors have to cope with it. If government's welfare, education and urban policies were not chronic failures, suburbs might be more welcoming to new residents and to the housing construction Connecticut needs so badly.

All state government has to do is stop manufacturing poverty.

But maybe with the housing legislation Connecticut has been putting too much focus on suburbs. Lately the glorious cherry blossoms in Wooster Square Park, in New Haven, have provided a spectacular reminder of the advantages and potential of city life.

After all, the main problem with cities today is not infrastructure as much as many of the people who live there. A city with "mixed-use development" has great virtues -- commerce, industry, hospitals and medical offices, various kinds of residences, markets, restaurants, churches, theaters, and parks, all within walking distance of each other, with shops and housing often in the same buildings. In such places it is possible not just to live without a car but to be glad to be free of its expense.

Thanks in large part to Yale University, downtown New Haven somewhat sustains this way of life. Downtown Hartford lost it 60 years ago with horribly misguided urban redevelopment. But under the same mayors who would like to export their poor, both cities are waking up, striving to increase middle-class housing downtown or nearby.

Sometimes this effort is scorned as "gentrification," but gentrification is exactly what the cities need. Why is Stamford booming while Bridgeport -- only 23 miles east on the same railroad, highways and coast, with a better harbor and an airport -- sinking in decrepitude and struggling to just keep the lights on downtown?

Maybe it's because, being closer to New York City, housing in Stamford long has tended to be more expensive and so being poor there wasn't as easy as it was and remains in Bridgeport.

The poor can't be deported. So why can't Connecticut ever raise them to the middle class? Why is the decades-long failure to lift them never even officially acknowledged?

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.

Chris Powell: Bathos in Bridgeport

“Iranistan,’’ Bridgeport boy and circus impresario P.T. Barnum’s grandiose structure in the city survived only a decade before being destroyed by fire in 1857.

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Connecticut's top elected officials quickly accommodated themselves to the disgrace of Joe Ganim's return to the mayoralty in Bridgeport in 2015 despite his having served eight years in prison upon conviction in federal court for vast corruption in office.

After all, just a year after Ganim was sent away in 2003, Gov. John G. Rowland resigned and pleaded guilty to federal corruption charges as well. Rowland was a Republican and Ganim a Democrat, so together they more or less normalized and bipartisanized betrayal of public office.

Of course, no one in state government could have refused to deal with Ganim in his return as mayor without also disenfranchising all of Bridgeport, Connecticut's largest and most troubled city. But looking away from corruption and failure in Bridgeport, as state government long has been doing, has become a betrayal in itself.

The city's newspaper, the Connecticut Post, notes that federal prosecutors have charged five Bridgeport officials with corruption in the last 10 months. The city's former police chief, Armando Perez, and personnel director, David Dunn, close associates of Mayor Ganim, pleaded guilty to the rigging of the chief's test for promotion. They are in prison. State Sen. Dennis Bradley and Board of Education member Jessica Martinez are charged with campaign-finance fraud. City Councilors Michael DeFilippo is charged with absentee-ballot fraud and has resigned.

The problem in Bridgeport isn't something in the city's water supply. (More than water, Ganim drank expensive wine extorted from city contractors, among other “gifts.”) More likely the problem arises from a lack of political competition in the overwhelmingly Democratic city, the ease of fooling impoverished and disengaged constituents, the corner-cutting hunger for government employment that grows amid poverty -- and the indifference of the governor, state legislators, prosecutors and civic leaders.

For it is hard to find anyone in authority who has spoken out about corruption and failure in Bridgeport, even as there is speculation that federal prosecutors are pursuing more corruption.

The cheating on the police chief test was done to secure the job for Perez, the mayor's crony, and while it may be hard to prove that Ganim directed or knew of the cheating, it is hard to believe that he had no hint about it.

The election fraud charges pending against the other three Bridgeport officials can't be tied to the mayor, but violating election law has become a tradition in Bridgeport.

The attitude at the state Capitol seems to be to keep throwing money at Bridgeport and Connecticut's other troubled cities without ever auditing them for results. This causes unaccountability and colossal waste. No one in authority seems bothered that fantastic amounts appropriated over many years have yet to diminish poverty and mayhem or improve school performance in Bridgeport and the other cities. Contenting the government class that presides over chronic failure seems to be enough.

Has anyone in authority in state government ever contemplated what Bridgeport's restoration of Ganim said about the city -- its demoralization and desperation?

But now with so many corruption charges being brought in Bridgeport in such a short time, someone in authority in state government should be asking why only federal prosecutors investigate such offenses. Have the state police and state prosecutors been given confidential instructions or advice to avoid looking into corruption in state and municipal government? Or are they just afraid or incompetent?

For its own sake as well as the state's, Bridgeport should be under perpetual investigation by a special team of state auditors. But is such investigation impossible under a Democratic state administration because Bridgeport sends the largest delegation to Democratic state conventions and produces enormous pluralities for the party?

If that's why corruption and failure in Bridgeport draw no concern from state government, Democrats are the party of corruption in Connecticut.

After all, Republicans have no power in the state, and while denouncing Donald Trump makes Democrats feel good about themselves, Trump isn't president anymore and bashing him won't clean up Bridgeport or correct any expensive policy failures.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.

Make 'em smile!

The Barnum Museum, in Bridgeport, which has loads of stuff about the impresario’s career and about Bridgeport.

“The noblest art is that of making others happy.’’

— P.T. Barnum (1810-1891), the entertainment mogul best known as the creator of the the modern American circus, in Struggles and Triumphs. A native of Bethel, Conn., he is most associated with Bridgeport, the once world-famous industrial powerhouse that was his base of operations and where he served as mayor in 1975-1876.

The phrase "There's a sucker born every minute" is a phrase closely associated with Mr. Barnum but there’s no evidence he actually said it.

1866 newspaper advertisement for Barnum's American Museum, on Ann Street in Manhattan.

Downtown Bethel in 1914.

Chris Powell: Conn. can do without higher education for a while; more Bridgeport bathos

Main quad at the University of Connecticut’s flagship campus, in Storrs

— Photo by Daderot

MANCHESTER, Conn

First the University of Connecticut asked state government for an emergency appropriation of more than $100 million. Now the state colleges and universities system, which operates the regional universities and community colleges, is asking for an emergency appropriation of $69 million. UConn's deficit arises largely from mismanagement of its Health Center. The regional universities and community colleges suffer most from falling enrollment.

Ordinarily institutions losing so much money would do more than wring their hands and seek bailouts. They would cut expenses, and since most higher education expenses are personnel, they would cut there. But since state government has been under Democratic administration for 10 years and state government employee union members constitute the party's army, their contract forbids layoffs and reductions in compensation.

So while the universities and colleges can turn off their electricity, heat, and internet service, they can't economize in the most practical and effective way. Even if they closed entirely they still would have to keep paying everyone, at least until the current contract expires.

So what is to be done about higher education's insolvency?

Legislators seem to have nothing to say about it, and they hardly meet anymore even though they still seek re-election next month. Gov. Ned Lamont has yet to offer any ideas, and he may be finding little glory in ruling by decree, since his work increasingly is just a matter of calculating deficits and seeking more federal bailouts. With the state's economy having shrunk by almost a third this year amid the virus epidemic, tax increases can't be seriously talked about until after the election, and even then it will be crazy talk. But the state employee union contract demonstrates Connecticut's infinite capacity for insanity in government.

Actually, while it wouldn't save on payroll right away, closing higher education indefinitely might be best.

For only a fraction of higher education produces any practical value to the state's economy, and while the rest of it theoretically can give students greater understanding and appreciation of life, it is deteriorating.

Most students admitted to the regional universities and community colleges already require remedial high school courses, having been advanced not by learning but mere social promotion. UConn has escaped the remediation scandal but still is being swamped by the political correctness sweeping higher education nationally.

There is less education, more indoctrination and political posturing, and more complaining about "systemic" racism to keep everyone in line with the indoctrination even as no one ever identifies the supposed racists or racist policies. Despite the prattle for "diversity" there is little political diversity among the faculty. People of all ancestries are welcome as long as they think the same. The idea of inviting a non-left-wing speaker sets off alarms.

The problem with education in Connecticut is not higher education but lower education, since most high school graduates fail to master basic high school work. This is worst in the cities. This is always presented as a money problem but decades of spending increases haven't changed anything, since it's a parenting problem.

Until higher education can find a purpose higher than subsidizing educators, Connecticut could do without it.

xxx

FOREVER CROOKED: Add the new corruption in Bridgeport to the long list of disturbing issues being ignored at the state Capitol. Last week the city's former police chief -- a close friend of Mayor Joe Ganim, Armando Perez -- joined former city personnel director David Dunn in pleading guilty to federal charges of rigging the chief's testing and hiring procedure.

The mayor already has served a long prison sentence for the corruption he committed during his first administration, and everyone understood that he wanted Perez to be chief during his second administration. So it is hard to imagine that the test rigging happened without the mayor's approval. But the state's political leaders, Democratic and Republican alike, have nothing to say about the matter.

After all, it's just Bridgeport. It's the state's largest city, but also its poorest, so who cares?

Ganim's spokeswoman says the guilty pleas "help bring closure to this matter." Closure on corruption in Bridgeport? That will be the day.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.

Don Pesci: Deep historical ignorance fuels push to moth-ball Columbus statues

Statue of Christopher Columbus in Seaside Park, in Bridgeport, Conn.

VERNON, Conn.

Christopher Columbus statues across Connecticut are being mothballed, but politicians in the state’s larger cities desperately want Italians to understand, in the words of Don Corleone in Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, “It’s nothing personal.”

The pols in Connecticut, a state that has in it more Italians per square inch than most others, still need Italian votes. Will Italians, during the next elections, turn on anti-Columbus (and moth-balling supporters) such as Mayor Justin Elicker, of New Haven, and Mayor Luke Bronin, of Hartford? Italians, everyone knows from reading Puzo, like their revenge cooled in the fridge.

Both mayors have given Columbus statues the boot. Bronin said, “When the statue of Columbus was erected in Hartford a hundred years ago, it was meant to symbolize the fact that Italian-Americans, who had faced intense discrimination, had a place in the American story. But surely we can find a better way to honor the immense contributions of the Italian-American community in our country and in our community. I’ll also be working with our Italian-American community in Hartford and throughout the region to find an appropriate way to honor their incredibly important place in Hartford’s and our nation’s history.”

And Elicker concurred: “The Christopher Columbus statue for many Italians is a celebration of Italian heritage. But the statue of Christopher Columbus also represents a time of colonialism and atrocities committed. It is the right decision to remove the statue. After the statue is removed, I believe it is important that we, as a community, have a conversation about how to best honor the heritage of so many Italians who have made New Haven their home.”

Whomever these mayors have in mind for suitable stand-ins for Columbus – no names have been mentioned – none of the stand-ins will have been credited with opening the new continent to European exploration, the real irritant in the craws of Columbus haters.    

The assault on Columbus by "Black Lives  Matter" is particularly annoying because it is so wrong-headed. Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492, as we were taught to recite in schools long before it became fashionable to celebrate tribal differences in the United States under the rubric of diversity. We are quickly becoming “many out of one,” reversing the E Pluribus Unum motto on our increasingly worthless coinage.The first slaves were brought to what later became the United States – now the clannish dis-United States – in 1619, long after the death of Columbus. Certainly Columbus is less responsible for slavery and the oppression of African-Americans than, say, Thomas Dartmouth “Daddy” Rice, the original Jim Crow.

Jim Crow was a fictional character created by “Daddy” Rice, around 1830, a little more than three decades before the father of the Republican Party, President Abraham Lincoln, issued his Emancipation Proclamation abolishing slavery in the midst of a bloody, corpse filled Civil War waged, among other reasons, to end slavery.

Rice was a “black face,” white minstrel artist who introduced Jim Crow, a fictional stereotypical slave, into his act. As his show became more and more popular, the expression “Jim Crow” became a widely used designation for blacks, and later, around the time Republican President  Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard to facilitate the desegregation of public schools, the expression became a battle cry against racial discrimination in the south – not that the north was Simon-pure with respect to a poisonous tribalization of races that militated against E Pluribus Unum.

Hey, they don’t teach this sort of stuff anymore in Yale or Harvard; or, for that matter, in Hartford and New Haven high schools.

The whole business of discrimination still resonates with many Italians. The largest lynching in the United States occurred in 1891 -- 385 years after Columbus, certainly among the greatest navigators of his age and the man responsible for opening the Americas to a European discovery, died in obscurity, bleeding from his eyes at his home in Spain – when a New Orleans mob murdered 11 Italian-Americans following a trial of the Catholic “dagoes,” accused of murdering a police chief, that had produced six not-guilty verdicts and three mistrials. New Orleans was impatient for the justice of the rope, and so the innocent men were strung up.

Ah, well, stuff happens. Scripture tells us none of us are perfect, and history, we know, is pockmarked with imperfections. Democratic President Obama used to tell us that the details of history were less important than the arc of history. Modern historians and students -- engaged, like air-brusher Joseph Stalin, in the art of revising history through the murder of his political opponents – seem to think that the arc of history is less important than their own fictional version of the way things ought to have been during the days of Columbus.

The above named mayors of major cities in Connecticut have all claimed they are performing a public service by ridding public squares of Columbus statues to prevent vandalism, which is on a par with closing banks to prevent bank robberies or closing police stations to prevent arsonists from burning them down or tolerating the vandalization of the Lincoln Memorial by historical amnesiacs who have not, before despoiling the memorial, read the words of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address engraved on the north wall of the memorial. In merry old England a statue of Churchill – who, along with President Franklin Roosevelt, wiped the noses of real Fascists in the dust – has been vandalized, likely by European anti-fascist-fascists, brothers and sisters in arms with domestic terrorists such as ANTIFA here in the USA.

Are there no video cameras that might be deployed around Columbus statues to apprehend and arrest the vandals? Are we truly incapable of making proper distinctions between peaceful, lawful protesters and the thugs who shield themselves behind licit protests to liberate Louis Vuitton stores of bags that may be sold on the black market to finance, among other things, the toppling of Columbus statues in Connecticut?

An Italian from New Haven writes me, that he wishes someone would say something “to let the public know that not everyone is complicit” in what he and most Italians regard as the usual, time honored anti-Italian, anti-Catholic historical revisionism.

Done.

My correspondent tells me he plans to vote in the upcoming November elections – after cool, revengeful deliberation -- to strike a blow for historical lucidity, liberty under law and those few politicians in Connecticut who find distasteful the destruction of public monuments in the state’s urban cultural war-zones.   

Don Pesci is a Vernon, Conn.-based columnist.

Don Pesci: Conn.'s desperate restaurant owners wonder when...

How long?

VERNON, Conn.

On June 20, Connecticut will once again be open for business – sort of. The road to the grand opening has been a bumpy one full of false turns, sudden cul-de-sacs, and the driver of the bus headed towards a reopening of the state, now nursing a potential budget deficit of close to $1 billion,  appears to be navigating irresolutely.

Will restaurants in Connecticut be fully opened on the date set by Gov. Ned Lamont, June 20, or not? Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo, with whom Governor Lamont of has of late been having a Coronavirus shut-down bromance, already has turned the corner. Restaurants in Rhode Island, having got the jump on Connecticut, already are opened for business – sort of.

In a June 3 story, Hearst news noted that Connecticut restaurant owners were clamoring for an earlier opening date for indoor dining: "Some 550 businesses signed a petition by the Restaurant Association calling for a return to indoor dining on June 10. They include companies operating nearly 40 restaurants in New Haven and 30 in Stamford, from chains such as Buffalo Wild Wings, with locations in Stamford, Danbury, Milford and North Haven, to local haunts like Galaxy Diner in Bridgeport and upscale options such as Mediterraneo in Norwalk and Greenwich.”

Executive director of the Connecticut Restaurant Association Scott Dolch wrote to Lamont, “This is not hyperbole. Just this week and only steps from the Capitol, Firebox Restaurant in Hartford closed after 13 years in operation. They simply could not hold out any longer. Right now, every day counts for our industry.”

 Tic Toc.

 And then, as an aside that in some fashion must have penetrated Lamont’s soft shell, “Dolch noted that Rhode Island has already resumed indoor dining service, and that Connecticut’s coronavirus case count is better than that of New York and Massachusetts.”

Well, Lamont drawled, “Everybody wants to get going yesterday — I appreciate that,” Lamont said. “I am going to be a little cautious in terms of what the next round is. ... Maybe we can accelerate that a little bit.”

And then, as an aside that in some fashion must have penetrated Lamont’s soft shell, “Dolch noted that Rhode Island has already resumed indoor dining service, and that Connecticut’s Coronavirus case count is better than that of New York and Massachusetts.”

 "’I've just seen tens of thousands of people protesting in New York City — thousands more in Boston. Neither of them have opened up any of their restaurants - they haven't even opened for outdoor dining that I know of as yet,’ Lamont said. ‘So I want to be very careful before we open our restaurants and invite people from the whole region here.’"

That’s a NO to Dolch and his 550 business petitioners.

Dolch and Connecticut restaurant owners really have nowhere else to turn for succor. In ordinary times, Dolch’s petitioners might have curried support among a dwindling number of legislators in the General Assembly who do not want Connecticut to be eating Rhode Island’s dust, but the General Assembly has put itself in suspended animation until it once again is called into service by the governor, and Lamont’s extraordinary autocratic powers do not lapse until September. Already – someone is keeping count – Lamont ranks fourth in the nation among governors who have issued the most executive orders, and he has three months to go before he runs out of autocratic gas.

Other problems may be looming on Connecticut’s dark horizon.

 On June 4, the Lamont administration sent a notice around to Connecticut’s media that his administration is establishing a program, called the Connecticut Municipal Coronavirus Relief Fund Program, in which the state will reimburse city and town governments for expenses related to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a story in The Day of New London.

The program, administered through the Connecticut Office of Policy and Management, is setting aside $75 million to be distributed to municipalities in Connecticut, “part of $1.4 billion in Coronavirus Relief Funds the state has gotten from the federal government.”

The Connecticut Conference of Municipalities, according to The Day’s story, “said it is appreciative of the announcement but noted that federal guidelines recommend that 45 percent of the total $1.4 billion in Coronavirus Relief Funds, which would be $630 million, be spent on municipalities with populations below 500,000.”

There is, a reader who has successfully passed fourth grade exams in basic math will notice, a considerable difference between the $630 million the Feds expect Connecticut to distribute to its towns in Coronavirus Relief Funds and the planned Lamont distribution of $75 million. Some sharp-eyed accountant in Washington, D.C., is likely to notice the disparity and – maybe – cut Coronavirus funding to the Connecticut proportionally.

The national government now has a debt of some $26 trillion, and every penny helps.

Don Pesci is a Vernon-based columnist.

Chris Powell: Plenty of voter fraud in Bridgeport; piling on Purdue Pharma

Iranistan, the residence of P.T. Barnum, in 1848

According to Connecticut Secretary of the State Denise Merrill, the Nutmeg State has too little voter fraud to worry about. But she doesn't really know, because until last week few people had ever seriously looked.

But last week Connecticut's Hearst newspapers looked into the extraordinary level of absentee voting in Bridgeport's recent Democratic mayoral primary election, in which the challenger, state Sen. Marilyn Moore, won on the voting machines but was defeated as Mayor Joe Ganim overwhelmingly carried the absentee ballots.

The Hearst investigation found that fraud was extensive among its limited sample of voters. Ineligible people -- including people who were not registered to vote, people who were not Democrats, and felons and parolees -- received and cast absentee votes. Elderly people were coerced or pressured to complete absentee ballots for the mayor by Ganim supporters who came to their homes. Absentee ballots were sent to people who did not request them. Record-keeping by Bridgeport election officials is sloppy, maintaining incorrect birthdates for some voters and mistaken receipt dates for absentee ballots.

Secretary Merrill has forwarded the Hearst report to the state Elections Enforcement Commission and asked it to investigate because her office lacks the commission's powers. But the secretary should be chastened by what already has come out, for she has been advocating legislation to deny public access to voter registration data

With her legislation Merrill claims to be supporting individual privacy. But voters are not entirely private citizens, for they hold the most basic public office -- elector -- an office established by the state Constitution. Nobody has to become an elector. You volunteer, and election fraud cannot be detected by the public or news organizations unless the names, addresses, and birthdates of electors are as public as they long have been in Connecticut.

Since, as her legislation signifies, the secretary denies the possibility of voter fraud, the law should not hinder the press and public in detecting it as the Hearst papers have just done.

* * *

PILING ON PURDUE PHARMA: If there was an award for piling on, Connecticut Atty. Gen. William Tong would be a leading contender. Practically every day he announces a lawsuit his office is joining to challenge some policy of the Trump administration.

Those policies may be questionable but it is also questionable how much Tong's office is really doing with the lawsuits beyond providing pro-forma endorsements that get publicity for him.

Tong has worked up his greatest indignation for the lawsuit he has joined with many states against Stamford-based Purdue Pharma, manufacturer of the painkiller OxyContin, to which many people have gotten addicted, many of them dying from their addiction. Tong wants the company liquidated and the proceeds somehow distributed to the drug's supposed victims.

But the country's worsening addiction problem long preceded OxyContin, and nobody could have gotten addicted to it if the U.S. Food and Drug Administration hadn't approved it 24 years ago and if thousands of doctors had not prescribed it too heavily to their patients. The FDA and those doctors bear the immediate responsibility for abuse of the drug, not the manufacturer, since from the beginning OxyContin has been a controlled substance.

Of course suing those who uncontrolled the drug would be a tougher and fairer fight for any attorney general who enjoys piling on.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.

Chris Powell: Raising tobacco-purchase age would do little for city kids

Why do officials in politically correct cities like Hartford, New Haven and Bridgeport put so much effort into posturing on issues over which they have no serious jurisdiction? Maybe it's to console themselves for their ineffectuality with important matters like the worsening poverty, ignorance, and demoralization of their constituents.

Last week Hartford was at it again as its City Council prepared an ordinance raising to 21 the age for purchasing tobacco products. A week earlier Bridgeport had adopted an ordinance purporting to outlaw homemade plastic guns.

Even as Hartford prepared the tobacco ordinance, several of its high school students got sick in school after consuming marijuana-laced brownies given to them by other students. Marijuana possession by minors is illegal but of course it has been decades since that prohibition deterred anyone, and now both Connecticut and the country are starting to figure that the prohibition might as well be repealed and marijuana sold legally and taxed.

So why does Hartford think that raising the age for tobacco purchases will accomplish anything? Why does Hartford think that minors won't continue to purchase tobacco through older friends, as they do with alcoholic beverages?

And what about the bigger question of the age of majority? How sensible is society when it proclaims 18-year-olds mature enough to vote, serve in the military, and make contracts but not mature enough just to smoke and drink?

Poor judgment will always be part of youth. But an ordinance purporting to protect kids against tobacco in a city where most kids have no father in their home and many have no real parent at all is worse than poor judgment. It's a sick joke by shameless adults.

xxx

VINDICATING THE FLAG: Another flag-salute case has arisen from a public school in Waterbury.

Twenty-five years ago the city's school system tried to punish a black high school student who, calling herself a Communist, refused to salute the flag at the start of the school day. She beat the school system in a lawsuit because school administrators somehow had overlooked or deliberately disregarded a renowned U.S. Supreme Court decision from 1943 forbidding schools from coercing students into making expressions of belief. That decision upheld freedom of conscience, which the country then was defending at profound cost in a world war.

In the new Waterbury case some nonwhite students allege that a teacher has been mocking and shaming them for refusing to rise for the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag, which they say is their way of protesting racial discrimination.

A trial may be needed to determine exactly what has been happening but there should be no doubt about the long-established right not to salute the flag -- just as there should be no doubt that the right not to salute the flag is a powerful reason for saluting it.

Of course the country has not achieved perfect justice. But it never will. It can only keep improving. With its proclamation of "liberty and justice for all," the Pledge of Allegiance will always be largely aspirational. But the heroes of the civil rights revolution 50 years ago accepted this and always carried the flag into the struggle. They succeeded and changed the country and thereby vindicated the flag.

A good teacher would explain this to his students as he acknowledged their right not to salute the flag. If they still refused to salute, he would let them be undisturbed, since, after all, their liberty still would be pretty good advertising for the country.


Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.

Don Pesci: P.T. Barnum, Trump and Connecticut politics

Likeness of showman and Bridgeport Mayor P.T. Barnum on the Bridgeport centennial half dollar commemorative coin,  minted in 1936 to celebrate the centennial of the incorporation of the city. 

President Trump does not like the press he is receiving. The press – we now call it the media, because bloggers and ideologues with knives in their brains have been folded into it – convinced of its moral rectitude, begs to differ. Trump’s press notices would be very much different if he were the media, and his Twitter activity has been taken by some as an attempt to offset this lamentable deficiency.

Trump has been setting the day’s press calendar by tweet-twerking. He is, his Democratic and Republican opponents insist, the presidential equivalent of the-guy-in-a-bathrobe-in-his-mom’s-cellar turning the world upside down by loosing upon it nuclear-tipped declarations. To Trump, tweets may be no more than a new colorful crayon in his box of tricks. To the contra-Trump media, they are a threat that must be disposed of, as the Sixties radicals used to say, “by any means necessary.”

The anti-Trump media so far has been successfully baited. The New York Times and the Washington Post have been so unforgivingly anti-Trump that they appear to Americanus Ordinarius to be purposefully unhinged, confirmation that Trump’s relentless opponents are either disappointed establishment congressional timeservers, part of the D.C. swamp  that Trump has pledged to drain, or reporters and editors longing for a return to the balmy days of President Obama, an interregnum that allowed them to snooze at their keyboards while the president performed cosmetic surgery on the face of Mother America.

Throughout the first year of the Trump Presidency, which already feels ancient, bruised Democratic and Republican opponents were rubbing their sore noggins and wondering groggily, as Hillary Clinton did in her most recent book, What Happened?

Ya’got mugged. That’s what happened. And, as the majority of Americans who did not buy Lady Clinton’s latest book suppose, you perhaps deserved it. Since he first stepped out of the cradle, self-advertising has been Trump’s business. He has been compared to President Andy Jackson, the hero of Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.'s  biography The Age Of Jackson. Before Jackson was devalued a decade ago by squeamish Democrats, the seventh president rightly had been considered the father of the modern Democratic Party. Others think that Trump is the 21st Century’s reincarnation of P.T. Barnum, who was, people tend to forget, a pretty savvy state legislator and mayor of Bridgeport, Conn.

Energetic and forward-looking, Barnum was an early abolitionist. He protested against the city’s saloons, pushed for prisoners to have work, and modernized Bridgeport’s utilities. Barnum certainly would not have been pleased to learn that Bridgeport politics has become something of a two-ring felony circus: Current Mayor Joe Gamin, now exploring a run for governor, spent years in prison for corruption, and  Ernie Newton, having spent more than four years in prison, is returning to his roots in Barnum’s old haunts, which Mr. Newton served in the state General Assembly.

Trump’s name has been invoked by leading Democrats and some media analysts as a cautionary tale that Republicans in Connecticut would do well to heed. According to some Democrats, presidential toxicity will infect Connecticut Republicans in the state who perversely refuse to denounce the nominal head of the national Republican Party. The  Republican leader in the Connecticut House of Representatives, Themis Klarides, already has been reproved for supporting the nominal head of her party.

Voters in Connecticut will be asked during the upcoming 2018 race, if only indirectly, whether they believe a president or a governor wields more political influence in Connecticut. The correct answer to the question is: Governors play a more decisive role in state government than presidents, however toxic.

Oddly enough, the upcoming elections in Connecticut will in large measure be a contest between two politicians not running for office in the state: Gov. Dannel Malloy, who has lame-ducked himself, and Trump, who is at best a moving target.

Both Connecticut U.S. Senators Dick Blumenthal and Chris Murphy have taken turns thwacking the Trump piñata.  In recent remarks, Murphy has suggested that Trump may be batty and therefore impeachable. "We are concerned that the President of the United States is so unstable, is so volatile, has a decision-making process that is so quixotic that he might order a nuclear weapons strike that is wildly out of step with U.S. national security interests," said Murphy, who often dashes in where even devils would fear to tread.

Impeachment and salacious behavior in the post-Harvey Weinstein period, some political watchers suppose, could be a touchy matter for Democrats, many of whom, including Connecticut moral avatars Blumenthal and Murphy, have enthusiastically supported impeached President Clinton and his wife, co-President and First Lady Hillary Clinton, who has only recently discovered the moral impropriety of married men sexually mauling women. The late political provocateur Christopher Hitchens wrote a whole book about this titled No One Left To Lie To that probably did not sell as many copies as What Happened?

Don Pesci is a Vernon, Conn.-based political and cultural essayist.

Chris Powell: Of contempt and credentialism

The P.T, Barnum Museum in Bridgeport.

Joe Ganim for governor? At first the idea might seem as ridiculous as the idea of his again becoming mayor of Bridgeport seemed when he got out of federal prison after serving seven years for exploiting his city with racketeering, extortion, bribery, and tax evasion.

But of course Ganim is indeed mayor again and his recent musing about running for governor may be no more ridiculous than Donald Trump's running for president. Many voters throughout the country saw Trump as the perfect mechanism for signifying their contempt for politics and government. Might many voters in Connecticut view Ganim the same way, even though, unlike Trump, Ganim himself may have been a major cause of that contempt?

In any case Ganim's return as chief executive of Connecticut's largest city has signified more than any contempt felt by voters there. It has signified the catastrophic failure of urban policy in the state for the last 50 years, represented most horribly by the collapse of Bridgeport, once the thriving center of the state's industry, now a swamp of poverty, social disintegration, corruption and political patronage. Ganim's restoration also has signified the demoralization of the city's voters, their desperate belief that a crook's return to office might be an improvement over a mayor who, however ineffectual, at least had stayed out of prison.

That is, Ganim is a symptom of Connecticut's steady impoverishment by mistaken social policy, policy in which state government persists though it only worsens living conditions. No one in authority ever answers for this, and it now seems to be accepted as the natural order of things in the state, beyond discussion in politics.

Indeed, this week Gov. Dan Malloy actually reveled in that mistaken social policy, touting what he said was a sixth year of increase in the state's high school graduation rate. But this increase is meaningless in a public education system that even school administrators have begun to acknowledge is entirely one of social promotion, a system in which there are no standards for advancement from grade to grade and for issuance of a high school diploma.

Congratulating themselves this week, the governor and Education Commissioner Dianna Wentzell seemed never to have read the decision issued last September by Superior Court Judge Thomas G. Moukawsher in the latest school-financing lawsuit, wherein the judge found the financing system unconstitutionally irrational because it fails to deliver education to many students.

The judge's decision recounted testimony by school administrators that schools, especially in Connecticut's cities, are giving diplomas to many students who are essentially illiterate after 12 years of social promotion.

The measure of education is not the mere credentialism celebrated by the governor and the commissioner this week but actual learning. By that standard education in Connecticut is little better than it is in most states, since here, as there, standardized tests show that half of high school seniors never master high school English and two-thirds never master high school math but are graduated anyway.

Worse, many students who have not mastered high school are then sent on to public colleges where they require remedial high school courses and end up with degrees of little value, in subjects like social work, women's studies and sociology, as if this final bit of credentialism will prepare them any better for making a living in the private sector, where they find a terrible shock, since, unlike education in Connecticut, in the private sector results count.  

If mere credentialism is to be policy in education because it lets everyone feel good, state government could accomplish just as much and save a lot of money by issuing high school diplomas with birth certificates, thereby achieving a 100-percent graduation rate.


Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, Manchester, Conn.
 

Chris Powell: Arrogant "undocumented immigrants'' out of the shadows; fictionalizing parking for the handicapped

As they blocked Main Street in downtown Hartford by unfurling a 50-foot banner protesting deportations and an unfavorable (to them) U.S. Supreme Court decision, "undocumented immigrants" -- the politically correct term for illegal aliens -- and their supporters declared last week that they were "coming out of the shadows."

"I'm undocumented, unafraid, and here to stay," one announced through a bullhorn.

Nine protesters were charged by police with disorderly conduct.

Their disappointment was understandable but their indignation was misplaced and their presumption of a right to inconvenience and bully everyone else was contemptible. 

After all, few illegal aliens are "living in the shadows" in Connecticut. Hartford and New Haven have declared themselves "sanctuary cities," formally committed to nullifying federal immigration law, as state government itself is committed more or less, now that it is providing driver's licenses and college-tuition discounts to illegals. All Connecticut's members of Congress favor amnesty for illegals. 

Besides, "living in the shadows" is what lawbreakers do, although it's not as if any immigration-law violator is in danger of being persecuted for innocent characteristics like ethnicity, homosexuality or left-handedness. Every nation has the right to immigration law -- indeed, controlling immigration is the definition of nationhood -- and illegals have violated the law just as much as anyone else has.

Yes, the country's failure to enforce immigration law, induced by pressure from unscrupulous employers and groups that don't want any immigration-law enforcement, has contributed to the extenuating circumstances of millions of young people whose illegality was the responsibility of their parents. Politics has been obstructing legislation that might give them a "path to citizenship" -- and not just the politics of legislators hostile to immigration but also the politics of legislators hostile to achieving border control before amnesty. But that's democracy for you. Building consensus can take time.

Breaking a perfectly legitimate law and then demanding that it be changed in one's favor while one bullies innocent people on the street is pretty arrogant. Who do the illegals think they are -- Citigroup or Tribune Publishing, which undertook illegal corporate acquisitions in Connecticut, confident that they were influential enough to get the laws and regulations repealed?

If their arrogance is going to extend to blocking traffic, the illegals should go back in the shadows.

* * *

Because of legislation signed last week by Gov. Dannel Malloy, Connecticut's official emblem for reserving parking spots for the handicapped has been what the governor calls "modernized." It's more like fictionalized.

The old emblem showed a stick figure sitting in a wheelchair. The new emblem has the stick figure leaning forward in a racing pose as if engaging in a game of wheelchair basketball. The idea is to dispel the supposedly retrograde idea that the handicapped are handicapped and instead suggest that people with disabilities can lead active lives -- as if anyone thought there was some law against it.

But of course if the handicapped were not disadvantaged in some way, they would hardly need preferential parking, and most of the people whose cars are equipped with handicapped parking permits are not athletes but old folks unsteady on their feet, carrying canes, or lugging oxygen canisters.

So the new emblem is just another symptom of the political correctness plaguing Connecticut under the Malloy administration. In this respect the collapse of state government's finances is fortunate, for nothing will be spent to replace the handicapped parking signs just to get rid of the old emblem. The signs with the old emblem will be replaced only as they wear out. For the time being the PC brigades may have to settle for taking the signs off bathroom doors.

Chris Powell is a Connecticut-based columnist on politics and society and managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.

Chris Powell: Let suburbanites vote in cities

With Connecticut’s state tax revenue declining, those who consider themselves big thinkers have been advocating more regionalism, as if having towns share a dog warden will save them much as long as their municipal employee union contracts remain subject to binding arbitration and thus exempt from serious economies. In fact,  advocacy of regionalism long has been just a cowardly evasion of Connecticut's most expensive policy failures.

In any case try to find someone who will argue for more regionalism in the context of recent developments in Hartford. The city is beyond insolvent, with the new mayor, Luke Bronin, having to slash its budget and seek concessions from the city employee unions. Meanwhile the minor-league baseball stadium the city last year decided to build is now not only 20 percent over budget but also months late in completion. The entire home season of the baseball team seems likely to be lost.

Of course, few observers are surprised by this, competence not being expected from city government. Asked last week about the troubles of the Hartford stadium, even Gov. Dan Malloy remarked that he had not been enthusiastic about it. But the governor could have killed it with a word before it got started. He could have declared that if Hartford, while its school system and police protection were collapsing, really thought that it could afford $50 million to build a minor-league baseball stadium, the state administration, which covers half the city's budget, would reduce financial assistance to the city by whatever amount the city appropriated for the stadium.

Instead the governor, a Democrat, was silent, reluctant to alienate the city's Democratic organization, and now Hartford is out at least $60 million, and instead of a stadium and minor-league baseball the city more likely can look forward to years of expensive litigation with the developer.

Meanwhile The Hartford Courant disclosed last week that even as the city's school administration was closing schools and eliminating services to economize, it was also paying $61,000 for having sent 33 school employees to a conference in Miami, where the school system got an award, which might as well have been for obliviousness.

Such scandals are typical of Connecticut's cities and they happen because the cities long ago lost their independent, self-sufficient, politically engaged middle class employed in the private sector, becoming dominated instead by the government and welfare classes, dominated by takers rather than producers.

As a result people who are self-sufficient or aspire to self-sufficiency and aspire to get their children away from the pathology of government-created poverty relocate to the suburbs, where people who pay more in taxes than they receive in income drawn from taxes want nothing to do with regionalism, insofar as regionalism means fluff like overpriced stadiums and Florida junkets.

Though this situation offers suburbanites an escape, it is hideous all the same, since it lets Hartford, Bridgeport, New Haven, and Connecticut's smaller cities remain corrupt and exploited dependencies, free of political pressure or incentive to change.

So the regionalism that Connecticut needs should recognize that the state pays too much for its cities for them to function mainly as generators of poverty and patronage. The regionalism that Connecticut needs should enfranchise suburban residents to vote in city government elections and referendums, since suburban residents are already paying half of city government expense.

Connecticut's cities do not have a big enough private sector to bring city government under control, to make it pursue the public interest. But if city elections were actually regional elections, city officials might behave more responsibly -- might not even think of spending money on stadiums and trips to Florida.

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.

Chris Powell: Applying the Looney Principle to a deserving Yale University

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Let no one accuse Connecticut's Democratic Party of not having any principles. The party seems to be operating on a principle of state Senate President Martin Looney. The Looney Principle is simply: What's yours is mine.

The Looney Principle is on display more than ever now with his legislation to tax large private college endowments, the threshold set so that only Yale University's endowment, nearly $26 billion, would be subject to taxation. Looney and other supporters of the legislation say it would prod Yale to invest more in ways beneficial to New Haven, as if Yale doesn't have a right to spend its own money in its own interests.

But the core constituencies of Connecticut's Democratic Party, the government and welfare classes, are growing anxious as their parasitism and mistaken policy premises keep driving the state down and tax revenue with it, and they see Yale's endowment as ripe for plunder. After Yale's endowment is taxed, maybe private endowments and savings will be next.

For Connecticut must not ever tell its government employees that they no longer can take Columbus Day off with pay, nor its welfare recipients that they should stop thrusting on state government the support of children they never were in a position to support themselves.

Despite the assertion that Yale should do more for New Haven, Yale already does a lot for the city, voluntarily paying the city millions of dollars each year out of guilt for being tax-exempt like other colleges and nonprofit civic organizations. Indeed, without Yale and its thousands of middle-class employees and its students bringing a lot of money into the city from all over the country and the world, New Haven, impoverished as much of it is, would be Bridgeport, whose miles of crumbling industrial hulks along the Northeast Corridor railroad tracks give rail passengers the impression that a nuclear war broke out shortly after they left New York.

Actually what broke out was the Looney Principle.

Yale officials have responded indignantly to it, but the endowment-tax legislation is just what the university deserves for long having subsidized the parasitism that is now turning on it. No college in the country has been more politically correct than Yale. From nullification of federal immigration law to nullification of free speech to the coddling of the fascist impulse of its students demanding "safe spaces" against disagreement, Yale has supported many of the movements that are wrecking the country.

So if the endowment tax gives Yale ideas like those recently entertained by General Electric as it considered Connecticut's future, saw ahead only decades of tax increases, and began packing up in Fairfield to depart for Boston, at least Connecticut would be rid of a bad influence and New Haven's government and welfare classes would have to turn their parasitism on each other.

As for the state's premier purportedly public institution of higher education, the University of Connecticut, it again has defeated demands for greater accountability for its own endowment, managed by the UConn Foundation, which has enjoyed exemption from state freedom-of-information law.

Instead of subjecting the UConn Foundation to that law as all other public agencies are subjected, state legislators have agreed to require only that the foundation submit an annual report summarizing its financial transactions. The foundation would remain free to conceal the identity of donors and thus free to keep selling them university favors, as it did several years ago when an especially arrogant donor purchased the dismissal of the university's athletic director.

Since UConn will remain in effect a private university, state government might as well tax away its endowment too.

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.

Conn. Democratic Incumbent Mayors Drubbed; Now What?

In three large Connecticut cities, incumbent Democratic mayors were drubbed by primary challengers. Hartford’s Mayor Pedro Segarra was outhustled and outspent by Democratic Party endorsed challenger Luke Bronin, formerly general counsel for two years to Gov. Dannel Malloy. In Bridgeport, Connecticut’s largest city, former mayor and felon Joe Ganim defeated Mayor Bill Finch in a three-way primary. And in New London, Mayor Darryl Finzio, more progressive than Leon Trotsky, lost to Councilman Michael Passero. One publication noted that the primary defeats of the three incumbent Democratic mayors indicated a “hunger for change” in cities long dominated by the Democratic Party. Three questions arise: What changes are in the minds of Democratic voters who turned a frozen face to incumbents? To what extent is change possible within cities dominated for decades by a single party? And why has the hunger for change not moved more voters toward the Republican Party?

The answer to the last question should be obvious: There is no serious and permanent Republican Party presence in large Connecticut cities. So small has the Republican Party footprint been in the three cities mentioned above that, it has been acknowledged by both major parties, Democratic primary elections in large urban areas determine victors in general elections.

Mr. Finch has taken the precaution of allying himself with an all-purpose third party and may challenge Mr. Ganim in a general election. However, the still intact Democratic Party machine in large cities gives Democratic Party endorsed candidates a leg-up over their competitors. Mr. Segarra is not likely to challenge Mr. Bronin in the upcoming General Election. Mr. Bronin had been blessed with a friendly nod from Mr. Malloy, the nominal head of the Democratic Party in Connecticut, during the primary and a fulsome endorsement after the primary. Mr. Malloy declined to endorse incumbent Mayor Finch, but lately he has signaled his disapproval of Mr. Ganim, without announcing that he would support Mr. Fitch over Mr. Ganim in any possible third-party challenge.

Following the election returns in Bridgeport, Mr. Malloy, according to a piece in CTMirror, hedged in response to Mr. Ganim’s victory. Was he willing to embrace Mr. Ganim’s, or would he support a challenge from Mr. Fitch?

“I’m not doing anything on that race today. I have to have some conversations and take a look at it,” said Mr. Malloy, “tersely acknowledging that Mr. Ganim’s return as mayor of Connecticut’s largest city would be awkward.”

Awkward indeed: Mr. Ganim, convicted of bribery, had spent seven years in prison before he audaciously sought to recover the position from which he was expelled. And his endeavor will likely be successful. In a one-party Democratic town, a party endorsement is tantamount to election. After the Great Fire at Windsor Castle, the oldest and largest inhabited castle in the world, the Queen was asked what she thought of the fire. “Awkward,” she said.

“Obviously,” Mr. Malloy added, “the situation is an unusual one by national standards,” but not, presumably, by the operative standards in Connecticut’s larger cities, many of which have been run by the state’s dominant Democratic Party for decades.

A report by WNPR noted: “Bronin raised over $800,000,” about twice as much as Mr. Segarra, “which allowed him, among other things, to advertise heavily on television and to send out an impressive number of political mailers. (Some recent ones included images of and praise from Governor Dannel Malloy, who campaign aides say hadn't approved their use.)”

This disclaimer – that Mr. Bronin’s former boss had not approved the subtle gubernatorial endorsements included in the mailers – follows hard on the heels of a suit brought against Mr. Malloy by the State Republican Party that claims the governor made use in his own campaign of mailers that may have run afoul of Connecticut’s stringent campaign finance laws.

Bridgeport, labeled by Ken Dixon of the Connecticut Post, formerly the Bridgeport post, "a seething mass of patronage," presents Mr. Malloy, the Queen mother of the Democratic Party in Connecticut, with a taxing problem. Should the father of the state’s “second chance” society torpedo Mr. Ganim’s march to the mayoralty perhaps, as columnist and Managing Editor of the {Manchester} Journal Inquirer Chris Powell has suggested, by threatening to turn off the patronage tap in Bridgeport? Or should Mr. Malloy simply bow to the fait accompli Mr. Ganim has managed to pull off and count himself lucky that the Republican Party is so weak and inconsequential in Democratic cities that, taken together, have assured both his election and re-election to office?

Either way, Mr. Malloy wins. But one can see in Mr. Malloy’s furrowed brow his political conscience tousling furiously with his political opportunities. Tammany Hall boss George Washington Plunkitt, tortured by such tugs and pulls of conscience, most often yielded to his opportunistic good angel: “I seen my opportunities, and I took’em.”

Don Pesci is  Vernon, Conn.-based political writer.