Anything For Money

When my family and I first drove by the above image, which once graced a billboard in Bristol, I couldn’t believe my eyes. You see, until recently, prostitution was legal in RI! So you can imagine my disappointment when, after fumbling for my cell phone in a mad attempt to dial the number listed, my wife informed me these ladies were only selling real estate. Bummer.

That’s when I got to thinking. Did you ever notice how some people will do just about anything for money? No? Oh, well, me neither. I’m too caught up in my own life to be concerned with the problems caused by greed (e.g. wars, poverty, climate change, a broken healthcare system) until those issues start impacting me and mine. Of course, by then, it’ll probably be too late for the good old USA, if not the planet.

But, honestly, who cares? Especially when we can take advantage of the downtrodden along the way through stuff like payday loans, pawn shops (as long as they’re not downtown), home foreclosures, corporate takeovers of public institutions, you name it! No sir, life is still good for the 1% and their uncritical followers. In fact, not being critical is the key to it all. Ignorance is bliss as the saying goes.

I mean, sure, being critical has its advantages. It allows people to become independent, productive citizens who make informed decisions and help protect society from the uncontrolled selfishness that leads to so much of the chaos in the world. Beyond that, though, it’s kind of limited. I don’t know about you, but I’d much rather have giant displays of voluptuous women selling… anything.

Am I Chicken Little Or Is Everyone Else A Little Chicken?

I recently read Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon by Gretchen Morgensen and Josh Rosner. The authors (Morgensen, a New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, and Rosner, the Managing Director at the independent research consultancy Graham Fisher & Co who advises regulators and institutional investors on housing and mortgage finance issues) do an excellent job of breaking down this complex topic into understandable terms. They reveal how the financial meltdown emerged from the corrupt practices, not only of Fannie Mae executives, but also of enablers at Countrywide Financial, Goldman Sachs, the Federal Reserve, HUD, Congress, the FDIC, and the biggest players on Wall Street, which led countless officials to ignore warning signs of an imminent disaster.

As I read the book, I couldn’t help but draw parallels between the factors that caused the mortgage crisis and what is currently happening in the national education reform movement. During the past two years, the Bullraker blog has been filled with posts trying to warn readers of the consequences of some of the reforms (e.g. privately-run, publicly funded charter schools and digital learning environments), which have far less educational value to students than financial value to investors, tech companies, and politicians.

However, since most of my rants seem to have fallen on deaf ears, I sometimes wonder if the sky isn’t actually falling. That is, until I read things like this excerpt from the epilgoue to Reckless Endangerment:

In the fall of 2007, Johnson returned to his old playbook. It was a time for another partnership, he said, in which the public sector and private industry would join hands for the greater good. A Blueprint for American Prosperity, designed to bolster America’s cities, was put forward by Brookings in November 2007. Promotional materials for the push sounded remarkably like the homeownership push made a dozen years earlier.

The Blueprint was “a multi-year initiative aimed at creating a new Federal partnership with state and local leaders and with the private sector to advance American prosperity,” Johnson announced at its launch in Washington. “The ability of the United States to compete globally and to meet the great environmental and social challenges of the 21st century rest largely on the health, vitality and prosperity of the nation’s major cities and metroplitan areas.”

Many of the same figures were on hand for this launch who had been standing alongside Johnson twelve years earlier. Henry Cisneros, the former HUD director who had sat on the board of KB Homes with Johnson and had overseen Clinton’s National Partners in Homeownership a little more than a decade before, delivered the keynote address at the Blueprint’s launch. Brookings created a Metropolitan Leadership Council to help promote the agenda; its members included Johnson, of course, but also executives from Goldman Sachs and Target.

The Johnson referred to above is one of the most vile of the book’s villians: James A. Johnson, the former CEO of Fannie Mae and former director of Goldman Sachs and KB Home, who is now chair emeritus at the Brookings Institute. It should then come as no surprise what types of reforms Brookings is calling for in education… But yet hardly anyone locally seems concerned about the validity of the reforms. How can that be? Do people not see the connection? Are they too afraid to ask the critical questions? I don’t know, but the longer citizens go without a conversation about the inner workings of these large private-public partnerships, the more vulnerable we will be when the next economic bubble pops.

As for me, I may be going crazy but at least I’ve become bold enough to occupy the board room. Meanwhile, I highly recommend Reckless Endangerment to anyone who doesn’t understand what 99% of America is so upset about, or how inside baseball is played at the highest levels… And, no, I’m not talking about Old Hoss!

A Hard Sell

Heading into tonight’s 2nd Annual Bristol Economic Development Forum, I promised myself I wouldn’t make comments or ask questions of the panelists — a veritable who’s who on the Bullraker education deformer shit list. I wanted merely to bear witness to the encroaching corporatization of Bristol-Warren public schools… and, in a way, I got my wish.

Despite preparing two statements during the forum and having my arm raised for close to a half hour waiting to be called on during the Q&A session, I was continually passed over by the moderator (a.k.a. Bullraker gadfly, Mike Byrnes). I can’t speculate whether Mike did this intentionally, though he has made it quite clear on this blog that he disagrees with my take on the education deform movement. However, I am certain that without an open and honest debate on the topic, we risk being sold a bad bill of goods. But, let’s face it, telling the truth about the deforms would be a much harder sell. And that’s bad for business!

In case anyone out there is curious, here were the comments I intended to make:

I have responses to two statements made earlier by Angus Davis.

The first is in regard to the U.S. spending over half a trillion dollars on K-12 education per year, even more than what we pay for defense. I’m for one am glad that’s the case. In fact, we should be spending way more on education than defense. And I don’t say this lightly. I have two advanced degrees, one in Mathematics and the other in Teaching & Curriculum, and I’d much prefer to be a teacher than a defense contractor. Unfortunately, one job pays 3 times more than the other! If we believed in education, then we would fund it like we believed in it. Not cut millions from schools districts!

The second thing I want to address is the notion that “innovative” ideas, like trying to bring Achievement First (AF) charter schools to Cranston, are regarded as controversial simply because people fear change. That’s untrue. I don’t fear positive change, but I do have serious doubts about whether charter management companies like AF can bring about positive change.

Here are a few sources that back up my position and will hopefully enlighten Mr. Davis and others on the genuine criticisms of the types of reforms he espouses:

• The book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education, by NYU professor and education historian, Diane Ravitch.
• The movie, The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting For Superman, by the Grassroots Education Movement.
• The article, Mathematical Intimidation: Driven by the Data, by the former director of the American Mathematical Society, John Ewing, which discusses the misapplication of value-added models that are used to assess teachers.
• The ongoing investigations by Democracy Now! journalists, which have uncovered scandals and questionable financial practices of charter management companies.
• The CREDO study conducted by Stanford University in 2009, which showed that only 17% of charter schools perform better than traditional public schools, while 37% actually perform worse!

Get Motivated!: Join The Peaceful Revolution

On Monday, Providence public schools were delayed two hours in anticipation of the traffic caused by a Get Motivated! motivational seminar. When the horde failed to materialize, the cynic in me saw the overreaction to a bunch of pro-corporate speakers as simply an unsuccessful commercial made by politicians who have already shown their willingness to allow private interests to take control of public education. But, just two days later, the optimist in me now sees crowds all over the country with enough motivation to put an end to the plutocracy and restart our democracy.

For example, the majority of Americans:

• favor taxing the rich and ending war and oppose cutting funds for education, roads, and entitlement programs in order to cut the deficit
• favor a public health care option
• oppose the bank bailouts
• favor a move to green energy and carbon reduction
• oppose the Supreme Court’s decision in the Citizens United case, which allows for unlimited contributions to political campaigns

Isn’t democracy a great idea? So, while the mainstream media too often covers the fake news, join a global movement called Occupy Together that is growing exponentially. Find the nearest occupation site (in my case, it’s Burnside Park in Providence’s Kennedy Plaza) and help change the world!

Campbell’s Law

Campbell’s Law states:

The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to measure.

Community activist Diana Campbell, who as far I know isn’t related to the author of the above quote, essentially applied the law in a blog  on Bristol-Warren Patch that discussed the recently passed Voter ID legislation in Rhode Island. She claimed the bill, which was supposedly designed to protect against voter  fraud (an almost non-existent crime as evidenced by the extremely small  number of cases throughout the US), will disenfranchise significant portions of our poor, elderly and minority communities. Unfortunately, the people who replied to the post don’t seem quite as enlightened as the Campbells.

Among her many job titles, Diana is a member of the Bristol-Warren School Committee. So it’s fitting that I should stumble onto Campbell’s Law while reading an article by the former executive director of the American Mathematical Society on how politicians across the country are using mathematical intimidation to push their school reform agendas. Having written on the subject of how poor mathematics contributed to Rhode Island’s unfair funding formula, I was encouraged to learn that I wasn’t  the only mathematician speaking out about the injustices of the school deform movement.

I hope Diana, perhaps the person most responsible for getting me started on a path of political activism, will read this post and also be comforted to know she isn’t alone. The voices for the voiceless could always use some accompaniment.

The Wheels Are Coming Off

Witnessing the downfall of the Bristol-Warren Regional School District will be like watching a train wreck in slow motion unless enough concerned citizens somehow manage to steer us clear of the oncoming disaster. The wheels were, of course, set in motion last year when the RI Department of Education unrolled a series of changes, including a funding formula that slashes millions of dollars from the district’s budget. Unfortunately, since then, only a handful of local residents have tried to slam the brakes on the reform (or, to be accurate, deform) movement taking place here and in school systems across the country.

Quite frankly, I’m amazed that more people haven’t questioned these educational policies, which have little to do with what actually takes place inside classrooms. Sure, high stakes tests and charter schools are fancy buzz words, but neither are the silver bullets with which their supporters wish to blaze a trail through public education. Evidently, the original intentions behind both ideas are lost on the deform crowd. Charters were meant to be utilized as laboratories for teachers to experiment with innovative curriculum, and tests as metrics to assess the strengths and weaknesses of students. In other words, charter schools and tests were supposed to inform and improve the teaching profession.

Instead, they are being used to drive and damage it. The deformers often cite poor test scores as a reason for firing teachers and closing schools to open up RI’s own version of charters, called Mayoral Academies – like the 5 Achievement First schools now proposed for Cranston and Providence. What they fail to cite as frequently, however, is that most charters don’t perform better than public schools. Hey, but at least with privately managed schools they don’t have to deal with those pesky unions anymore! With teachers’ unions out of the way, they can end all the messy labor rights stuff like tenure and collective bargaining and save tons of money by hiring inexperienced scabs to teach our kids on the cheap! It’s practically a no-brainer… because if you believe that junk passes for real education reform you might not have a brain.

Teachers’ unions definitely have problems. Their leaders don’t always represent them well… maybe because they’re too busy representing Doug Gablinske in emails, I don’t know. But trying to get rid of unions altogether will create a lot more problems than it will solve, especially since rank-and-file members didn’t cause an education crisis. Teachers aren’t failing schools. Politicians are. The next time I hear someone rail on “lazy teachers stealing from taxpayers”, I’m going to ask them to name names. Either they won’t because they don’t have the guts to defend their position, or they can’t because they’ve been led to believe in boogeymen. You know those pricy pensions that everybody’s talking about, the ones that were raided by state governments to pay for their deficits the same way the federal government has borrowed from Social Security? Yeah, those aren’t really the issue. Neither are “bad” teachers. No, to get to the heart of the matter, we’ve got to understand one reason why public funds are drying up so quickly (I mean, besides the obvious multi-trillion dollar wars and bank bailouts).

But, before that, let me just state something for the record. My wife and I believe in certain forms of philanthropy. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have worked with groups such as the Bristol Land Trust or the Bristol-Warren Education Foundation (BWEF), to name just two of the volunteer organizations to which we’ve donated time and money the last few years. A lot of good can come about through philanthropic work, but a new form of philanthropy — known as venture philanthropy — makes me more than a little wary. Venture philanthropists don’t donate to causes in good faith, they heavily invest and control them,  creating organizations which care more about short-term profits and tax evasion and less about long-term sustainability and problem solving.

Cuts to school aid, high stakes tests, and charter schools aren’t going to produce educational miracles. They are simply the vehicles which will allow for the privatization of public schools. As for teachers, they’re the scapegoats not because they’re “pigs at the trough” but because they prevent greater profit margins and have enough power to resist impending school deforms. Sadly, when I first brought this message to neighbors earlier in the year, I don’t think it was warmly received… and that’s putting it mildly. Although I now wonder if, in light of what’s happening in Cranston and Providence, it’s starting to sink in a bit.

It’s not by accident that Mayoral Academies aren’t accountable to elected school committees, but to a board stacked with pro-deform advocates. Nor is it a mistake that a RI-CAN Board Member, Kara Milner, is heading up a group in support of a school funding task force in Bristol-Warren to provide budget recommendations to the Joint Finance Committee. While her work as president of BWEF has been admirable (and taken alone might merit her inclusion on such a task force), Kara’s presence on the board of a pro-charter group should send up red flags when determining whether she should also have a say in school budget decisions. It’s easy to see how this connection to RI-CAN could be a huge conflict of interest. In offering advice on where and how much to cut from the district, she could weaken BWRSD in a way that makes charters an easier sell to desperate citizens and opportunistic politicians. Then, once the mayoral academies are put in place, who’s to stop the appointment of the pro-deformer(s) from the task force to the mayoral board? Not the school committee!

The battles in defense of public education have already proved costly on a personal level. I can’t sleep (It’s 3:30 AM!). I’m sure I lost some friends. Okay, they’re only acquaintances (People who write blogs on education in the middle of the night probably don’t have many friends.), but it still sucks! I also lost a little faith in society when I realized that ideas don’t win out necessarily on merit, but on momentum. My writing on the subject of school deform has been called conspiratorial. Even theatrical. Well, being a screenwriter by hobby, I guess I should take that as a compliment. If I were to ever write a script based on the losing fight over public education (Don’t worry, I won’t — it’s much more horrible and dramatic to watch everything happen live!) the screenplay would be a twist on a theme of one of my all-time favorite movies, the Oxbow Incident, which fittingly starred a Bristolian. Here’s a quick outline:

Crazy Train

Act I: A young family boards a train heading cross-country only to learn that it was chartered by financial terrorists and rerouted to an incomplete new track so they can bet millions on when it will derail.

Act II: The family is only able to convince a few passengers of the plot. They ruffle a few feathers. Most ignore the family’s pleas or dismiss them as crazy upon the rebuttals of the people convinced that the new route is the right way to go. The family gets off the train at the last safe stop, but continue to warn people around them of the possible calamity.

Act III: ? I haven’t gotten that far yet.

The Secret of Oz

The following press release was issued by the East Bay Patriots,  a local Tea Party group. Although I have been (and will remain) openly critical of the Tea Party on many issues, it shouldn’t stop me from reaching out to them when we find common ground.

I stumbled onto the Secret of Oz movie just as the East Bay Citizens for Peace  (EBCP) were kicking off their 25% Solution campaign to cut military spending by 25% and use the savings to fund community needs, which includes reducing the national debt. As EBCP moved forward with the 25% campaign, I was shocked to learn that, even by the most conservative estimates, close to half of our 13+ trillion dollar debt stems from prior military spending. Well, if the people behind the Secret of Oz had their way, we’d no longer have to pay interest on past military spending, which accounts for 18% of our current military budget — or roughly 3/4 of the 25% Solution. In fact, the U.S. wouldn’t have to pay interest on anything ever again!

The sovereign money movement may not solve all of the country’s economic woes, but it sure could help. Coming down from ivory (or emerald) towers to engage in healthy debate with those who have vastly different world views doesn’t hurt either.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

East Bay Patriots to show Secret of Oz film

Bristol, RI – May 16, 2011 – The Bristol East Bay Patriots will hold a meeting on May 16th, at the Rogers Free Library in Bristol. Meeting will start at 6:30pm.

Kevin Faria of East Bay Citizens for Peace will be the guest moderator and will be presenting the movie The Secret of Oz.

It is well known in economics academia that The Wonderful Wizard of Oz written by L. Frank Baum in 1900 is loaded with powerful symbols of monetary reform which were the core of the Populist movement and the 1896 and 1900 president bid of Democrat William Jennings Bryan.

The yellow brick road (gold standard), the emerald city of Oz (greenback money), even Dorothy’s silver slippers (changed to ruby slippers for the movie version) were the symbol of Baum’s and Bryan’s belief that adding silver coinage to gold would provide much needed money to a depression-strapped, 1890s America.

America is going broke! Now the question is how can we get out of this mess. Foreclosures are everywhere, unemployment is skyrocketing – and this is only the beginning. America’s economy is on a long, slippery slope from here on. The bubble ride of debt has come to an end.

What can government do? The sad answer is – under the current monetary system – nothing. It’s not going to get better until the root of the problem is understood and addressed. There isn’t enough stimulus money in the entire world to get us out of this hole.

Why? Debt. The national debt is just like our consumer debt – it’s the interest that’s killing us.

Though most people don’t realize it the government can’t just issue its own money anymore. It used to be that way. The King could just issue stuff called money. Abraham Lincoln did it to win the Civil War.

Today the government has to borrow our money into existence and then pay interest on it. That’s why they call it the National Debt. All our money is created out of debt. Politicians who focus on reducing the National Debt as an answer probably don’t know what the National Debt really is. To reduce the National Debt would be to reduce our money – and there’s already too little of that.

You have to go deeper. You have to get at the root of this problem or we’re never going to fix this. The solution isn’t new or radical.

Why can’t we just issue our own money, debt free? That, my friends, is the answer. Talk about reform! That’s the only reform that will make a huge difference to everyone’s life – even worldwide.

The solution is the secret that’s been hidden from us for just over 100 years – ever since the time when author L. Frank Baum wrote “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.”

Come and join us for this provocative film! It is an eye-opener!

SU Math Ed Alumni Newsletter Article

The following article will hopefully appear in the alumni newsletter of the Department of Mathematics Education at Syracuse University, where I graduated with an MS in Teaching and Curriculum in 2006.

RI’s Fair Funding Formula Gets an F

Soon after graduation and the birth of my baby girl, I returned home to Bristol, RI to raise her. Like most parents, my decision to relocate was based in part on the quality of education she would receive. Unfortunately, as my daughter prepares to enter kindergarten in the fall, the Bristol-Warren Regional School District (BWRSD) is about to undergo dramatic changes — for the worse.

Last year, the Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE) created their first-ever educational funding formula, which reshuffled hundreds of millions of dollars across school districts. Dubbed the “fair funding formula”, it factored in student enrollment, student need, and the capacity to generate tax revenue in order to determine each district’s allotment. While a formula was obviously needed in the last place in the country without one, what we currently have is anything but “fair” since some districts, including BWRSD, are losing up to half of their state aid over the next ten years.

From a mathematical perspective, it’s difficult to call a formula fair when it ignores outliers and assumes factors for tax revenue generation capacity (i.e. wealth) and student need (i.e. poverty) are normally distributed within and across districts and around the same mean. These glaring statistical errors produced several strange results. Among the most counterintuitive was the negative effect that the poverty factor had on nearly every district in calculating the percentage of the state’s share of funding.

However, as bad as the math is, the philosophy behind the formula is worse. Nowhere does it account for costs unique to regionalized districts (such as capital projects and debt services) or for rising costs over time. But perhaps the biggest flaw is the belief that the current system is not underfunded and the formula should be revenue neutral. New slices from the same tiny old pie (only 28% of the RI budget is allocated to education – the lowest in New England) won’t suddenly make things right. As a matter of fact, quite the opposite could happen. While BWRSD and other districts begin slashing millions in services in the face of their dwindling budgets, Pawtucket and Woonsocket, two districts receiving extra money from the formula, are suing the state because they still aren’t getting enough.

So, how did the Ocean State wind up in such a mess? Well, if you were to ask members of the Bristol-Warren Parents’ Alliance, a community group I co-founded in response to the adoption of the funding formula, they would probably claim that RI is caught in the politics of a national reform movement which is more about business than education… And they’d have a lot of evidence to back them up.

School Reform or Deform?

Officials here received national acclaim for firing teachers in Central Falls and Providence en masse, lifting a cap restricting the number of charter schools per district, and for starting the first of possibly many Mayoral Academies, publicly funded regional charter schools run by private charter management companies. For its many efforts, RI was recently awarded a $75 million grant from the federal Race to the Top (RTTT) initiative. To some this may not seem too bad, unless and until they take a closer look.

While less federal and state aid is going to traditional public schools throughout the country, RTTT, tech industry elites and Wall Street bankers are pouring billions into charter management companies. Through various federal tax credits and interest payments on construction loans alone, “non-profit” charter management companies and their rich financiers are able to nearly double their investments in only seven years. Charter management companies also allow donors to retain a great deal of control over their money, meaning they can influence charter school expenditures.

By Wall Street’s own projections, the emerging digital education market will be at least $500 billion, most, if not all, off the backs of taxpayers. It’s another economic bubble waiting to be blown up by many of the same perpetrators of the housing and dot com busts. Even if charter schools were more effective than traditional public schools, the numbers just don’t work out.

Unfortunately, the findings of the most comprehensive studies on charter schools to date show that, with few exceptions, charters do not perform better than public schools. In fact, a large number actually perform worse. Charters have been known to hire non-certified, non-union teachers (whom they overwork and underpay), refuse special needs students and cut programs. What’s more, under-performing charters are often difficult to close. In other words, like many big corporations, they become beholden to their investors rather than their customers (a.k.a. our children).

Since charter schools suck up large portions of funding, even the few that are performing better are likely doing so at the expense of the traditional public schools in their districts. On top of that, charters can siphon away tax dollars by piggy backing on existing public infrastructure and they tend to keep only the best students.

Mathematics Educators to the Rescue!

The problems with the current school reform movement may at times seem innumerable, which is precisely why we need experts in both mathematics and education to help simplify the equation. Local funding should only be above and beyond what state and federal funding must provide for adequate education. Our system, which puts local districts on the hook for the majority of education spending, is what really needs to be reformed. Otherwise, it will continue to perpetuate educational inequity based on wealth.

Our background in mathematics education puts us in a unique position. We not only have the knowledge of educational philosophies but also the mathematical skills to determine the efficacy of any reform movement. With that in mind, I urge you to get involved in your community. Check out the references below to learn more, attend school committee meetings and let them know your concerns. There’s no need to “wait for Superman” when we can be heroes.

References

BWRSD Documents: Funding Formula Basics, BWRSD PowerPoint, 1/31/11; Talking Points for FY12 Budget Development handout, 2/9/11; Total 10 Year Loss to Bristol-Warren handout

Democracy Now! – http://www.democracynow.org/tags/charter_schools

Diane Ravitch, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education – http://dianeravitch.com/

Education Week, Murdoch Dives Into Ed-Tech Market – http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/DigitalEducation/2010/11/murdoch_dives_into_ed_tech.html

Providence Journal, Reworking the formula for funding R.I. schools – http://www.projo.com/news/2010/popup/school-funding-map/ri-school-funding-plan.html

RIDE Funding Formula Proposal: State Share Ratio Calculation Chart; Core Instruction and Student Success Model Chart; State Share Ratio for the Community Calculation Chart; State Share Ratio Calculation (Sending Communities Combined) handout

Think Global. Act Local.

At last month’s Bristol Town Council meeting, East Bay Citizens For Peace (EBCP) asked the town to sponsor an event to discuss the impact of military spending on our communities and pass a resolution to call on the federal government to reduce such spending and instead fund local needs. Shockingly, all five members, including Kenny Marshall, who stated publicly that he would pass the resolution when asked (by me) at a debate prior to the November elections, denied EBCP’s request! It was a moment I won’t forget anytime soon, because it was then when I realized that many local leaders know and/or care very little about the larger issues. They confine themselves solely to the world of local politics, no matter how much regional and national politics shape the crises we face.

For example, the Joint Finance Committee (JFC) is allowing Bristol-Warren schools to be boxed in by the state, which is cutting aid to the district by more than $8 million over the next ten years. Rather than fully funding the school department’s request of $2.9 million to simply maintain the same services it currently provides — and giving all the stakeholders (i.e. students, parents, teachers, adminstrators, and concerned citizens) a full year to organize and direct their angst at the people most responsible for this mess (i.e. state and federal officials) – the JFC is forking over only a little more than half of the amount.

The decision is a disastrous mistake for a committee that scolded members of the public for being too “adversarial”. Just wait until the administration is forced to start cutting things like foreign languages, art, music, and sports. Then we’ll see some adversity! But the inevitable in-fighting will take the real antagonists off the hook. While communities bicker over what to slash from already tight budgets, the ones who put them in such unworkable positions are hailed as rock stars. If only there were local leaders who refused to let others place them in a box and dared to think outside of it. Well, we may not find them in “America’s Most Patriotic Town”, but they’re out there:

Hartford, CT City Council Votes to Bring Our War Dollars Home Now!

City Council Urges Hartford residents to Attend April 9 Antiwar March in NYC
Unbridled war spending by the federal government and President Obama has drained resources from our communities to keep the wheels of the war machine grinding on. This has also translated into attacks on education and unions, especially in the public sector, as states scramble to make up for budget shortfalls.

Recognizing that the majority of Americans are against the wars and occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan, 17 groups and individuals with a focus on peace and justice joined together to bring forward a resolution to the city council of Hartford, CT. It said, Bring Our War Dollars Home Now! Money for Education, Jobs, Housing and Healthcare!

On Monday, March 28th the city council of Hartford voted in favor of the resolution. The resolution goes on to urge residents to join thousands on April 9, 2011 for a national march in New York City that says Bring our troops home now, No to War, Cutbacks, Racism, Attacks on Muslims and Immigrants. For info go to UNACPeace.org

With this historic vote Hartford is the first state capitol to pass such a resolution and joins city councils in Portland, Maine and Northampton, MA in saying not another penny for wars and occupations.

Below you can read the resolution:

A resolution of the city council of Hartford, CT calling upon the US government and President Obama to Bring Our War Dollars Home Now

Whereas, the economic collapse has exhausted the financial resources at the local, county, state and federal levels of the US; and

Whereas, the US government since 2001 has spent well over 1 trillion dollars nationally on the wars and occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Connecticut nearly 28 billion dollars has gone to war spending and more than $453 million has been taken from the city of Hartford to fund the wars and occupations, and

Whereas, more than 5,700 US troops have been killed, more than 40,000 wounded; and

Whereas, hundred’s of thousands of civilians have been killed or wounded and the ongoing warfare poses great and unnecessary harm to the nation of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan and elsewhere in the world; and

Whereas, billions of tax payer’s money is spent to prop up repressive regimes in the Middle East and elsewhere around the world; and

Whereas,
educational services, medical care, housing, other essential public services, infrastructure repair, and family financing throughout Connecticut, especially in cities such as Hartford, have been diverted from a constructive economy to these wars and occupations, and

Whereas,
budget deficits, largely due to war spending, have been used as a pretext to force concessions from public sector unions from California to Wisconsin to Connecticut; and

Whereas, 2010 census data shows that Hartford has the highest poverty rating in Connecticut at 31.9% (nationally, the poverty rating is 14.3%) and

Whereas,
communities of color in Hartford have been hardest hit. Our city has a population that is 41% Latino and 38% African American/West Indian population. Unemployment for people of color is over 40%, and unemployment for people of color is nearly 20% and when employed, people of color make only 60 cents for every dollar made by white workers; and

Whereas, the above mentioned communities are heavily targeted for military recruitment,

Be it resolved that the city council of Hartford call upon the US government and President Obama to end the wars and occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan and bring our war dollars home now.

Now be it further resolved, that the city council of Hartford support informational events regarding the cost of the wars and occupations to our community; and

Be it further resolved that the city council of Hartford support the right of public sector unions and all other unions to collectively bargain and defend the interests of their members; and

Be it further resolved, that the city council of Hartford urge residents to participate in the April 9, 2011 national march in New York City to end the wars and occupations and bring our war dollars home.

If Kids Could Vote

The following poem was inspired by the many students who spoke out at last night’s Joint Finance Committee meeting. May their optimism and open-mindedness carry on with them into adulthood… and reemerge in others who have lost those qualities.

If kids could vote, they would not be ignored.

If kids could vote, there would be an end to war.

If kids could vote, no schools would need to close.

If kids could vote, all would be fed, sheltered and clothed.

If kids could vote, we would live in a better place.

If kids could vote, our future would be safe.