Dr. Douglas Hall discusses the timely new report “Who Pays? The Unfairness of Connecticut’s State and Local Tax System”

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On Monday May 18, PBS’s News Hour will be visiting Hartford Public High School.  They will arrive at 7:00am and are scheduled to interview superintendent Steven Adamoski.  And to make sure everything looks good on camera, they’re sequestering the trouble kids.  Continue Reading

(Middletown Eye) “It’s an opportunity to cooperate with another community group,” Wesleyan student and Food Not Bombs member Abe Bobman said about the group’s decision to accept the help of Middletown’s First Church. “And it’s an opportunity that’s too good to miss.” (more…)

We interview Christine Rapillo of the CT Juvenile Justice Alliance, about the implementation of “raise the age” in the state and other issues concerning youthful offenders.

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In response to several incidents, most notably a recent armed robbery attempt on the main campus of the University of Hartford, officials and city police began nighttime checkpoints at both campuses, Bloomfield Avenue and Asylum Ave.  The University originally assumed that the alleged perpetrators were from off-campus.  The implication was that they were from the city of Hartford.  Continue Reading

Silence is a Weapon

When we were in Viet Nam silence was used as a weapon by the Vietnamese.  We would walk a trail and trigger a 500 lb bomb and all the while a rice farmer would be working his field.  In our rage we would kill his water buffalo or sometimes kill him and add to the body count.  The Phoenix Program, a counter insurgency program, used assassination of VC cadre to instill terror in the local population. Suspected VC would be garroted and their bodies left in the street as a silent witness.  Silence begets complicity.

In Iraq and Afghanistan silence has become a weapon.  In this instance it is the silence of the American people and their elected public officials that makes them complicit.  By our silence we are complicit in the deaths of 5,000 fellow Americans, 300,000+ Iraqis and the wounding of over 30,000 Americans and over 1,000,000 Iraqis.  The US media is complicit by their silence in not reporting casualties daily, nor do they report the continuing rise in suicide, self inflicted wounds, drug overdoses and sexual assaults on female service members.

The Pentagon and military industrial complex is complicit in the destruction of the American economy by their silence about pro forma accounting tricks that have eviscerated and depleted public pension funds.  Corporate fraud is a pandemic that has robbed the American people and elected public officials have been complicit in this by their silence.  Pro forma accounting as opposed to Generally Accepted Accounting Prinicples  allows you to cheat, hide money, hide debt and cook the books.  An article in CFO magazine revealed that 54% of 181 publicly traded corporations use pro forma accounting.  Some of these are GE, AOL.Time Warner, Microsoft, Viacom, Disney and IBM to name a few.  On January 29, 2002 CBS news reported that Pentagon could not account for 25% of its funds totaling $2.3 trillion dollars.

Benito Mussolini is reported to have said, “ Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power”.  Here is an example of the silent truth.  There are currently 6.6 million people in he US either in jail, on probation or on parole.  Of those 2 million are incarcerated.  There has been a trend in America toward employing many of these prisoners as virtual slave labor for multinational corporations.  Inmate laborers now do everything from processing your credit card statements to making your airline reservations to assembling your tennis shoes.  The Dept of Justice operates something called Federal Prison Industries, known as Unicor, a profit making venture to benefit American corporations.

There has been a deafening silence by our elected officials as they have turned their backs on the American taxpayer.  Our congressional representatives have spoken up for jobs at Pratt Whitney, Sikorsky and Electric Boat, all military industrial clients, but not one word about the jobs lost in public education, health care, libraries and public works.  They are complicit by their silence.  I will not remain silent and I demand that all of our city council members, the mayor and superintendent and Brd of Education members break their silence and speak up against the monstrous cost of the illegal and immoral wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.   Your silence has been killing men, women and children.  It is time to raise your voice or prepare to reap the whirlwind.

Dave ionno
Veteran for Peace