The wars of occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost CT alone over 26 billion dollars, according to the National Priorities Project (www.costofwar.com)

Amidst a rash of gay teen suicides, ABC News feels it’s appropriate to publish this crap.

Though the Obama administration has withdrawn over 140,000 combat troops from Iraq, Democrats have not made this a campaign issue, even though most American do not support the war and never did.  So, a few things may be true: 1) they don’t care what we think, or 2) combat operations are not really over (now being fought by a mostly private, largely unaccountable private mercenary force, or 3) they don’t want anyone to know what’s going on over there at all, or 4) all of the above.

The number of civilian deaths in Iraq since the US invasion is probably over 100,000 (iraqbodycount.org).  The amount dead since the sanctions are easily 20 times that.

President Obama has escalated the Afghanistan occupation into Pakistan, something George W. Bush only dreamed about.

A good third of the crowd at Sunday night’s World Series game in Texas cheered for former president George W. Bush and his parents during the seventh inning stretch performance of “God Bless America.”

Islamophobia continues to rise fueled by rabid conservative talking heads on both radio and TV.

The Tea Party movement believes themselves to be an oppressed group in American politics springing up spontaneously from the populace, who somehow need to “take this country back,” yet they are comprised of some of the most privileged people in the country.  According to a CBS News poll, they are overwhelmingly white, over age 45, Christian and conservative.  The majority of Tea Party supporters are men, make more than $50k per year (20% make over $100k per year), and own guns.   A whopping 92% of them feel that President Obama’s policies are leading us to socialism.

The Supreme Court ruled that corporations have the same free speech rights as human beings and that they should be able to spend freely to influence candidates.  More here.

Here’s to the chads we punch and bubbles we fill.  Don’t forget to tip your polling station worker.

Click here to download the MP3

Click here to download the MP3

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/gail/

While the materials seem to be mostly union made, and Recycle Bank gives me some direct material benefit from all this redundant paper, I’d much prefer so much stuff to not get produced in the first place.  Then, no energy is expended making it and no energy is expended transporting it and no energy is expended recycling it.  All this paper, yet in the 2008 primary less than 5100 registered Hartford Democrats actually voted in the primary.  That’s 16.1%, which remarkably is better than the statewide average of 13.7%.

I wasn’t sure if I would even vote in the primary, but now I think I may just vote for the candidates who have sent me the least stuff.  That seems as good a reason as any to vote for a candidate. After all, the campaign postcards do very little to actually distinguish a candidate’s ideas, platform, or issues.  Instead they are placards for rhetoric, fancy graphics, bright glossy colors, gimmicks, and an apparent flood of finances, but a drought of substance.  It would be refreshing if the politicians learned from the evangelists in my neighborhood – get thee to Barnard park, with a band and megaphone and speak directly to the people.  Register new voters, rather than saturate the ones you already have.  Call me crazy, but I would like to see John Fonfara sing a gospel tune about how he intends to help balance the state budget.  That would be worthy of my vote.

Admittedly, I have lost count of this and today was recycle day, so here is a fuzzy list of these campaign literature offenders this primary season:

• Gerry Garcia – at least 3
• John Fonfara – at least 2 (which are twice as big as the other candidates’)
• Kelvin Roldan – no fewer than 7
• Edwin Vargas – at least 3
• Honorable mentions to Ned Lamont and Angel Morales for their late surge!

I have not seen one of these candidates in person this primary season.  But from the postcards, I know what they look like: shiny, flat and paper thin.

By The Alice in Not-So-Wonderland Collective

By Cheshire Cat

I don’t know any Tea Party members and have never been to a Tea Party event, so I had to see for myself what all the commotion is about.  Noam Chomsky has recently said that the Tea Party in its present form is a failure of the left and that they (the tea partiers) have some legitimate gripes, so a couple of friends and I decided to go and see if we could find some common ground.

Walking up the hill to the steps of the Capitol, slightly nervous and unsure of what to expect, I was relieved to find that nobody paid much attention to us even though I thought we clearly looked out of place (under 35, tattooed, wearing black tee shirts). The first thing I noticed was Holy crap, there were a lot of flags! They were mostly American and Gadsden flags (coiling snake on a yellow background), however the flags that most caught my attention were the ones on the main stage, a row of them that had the tops of the poles adorned with gold crucifixes- which was a little creepy IMHO. Also, there were less cops than I expected (around 6 that I counted) which, for an event that drew a few hundred people, was odd considering that an hour earlier I was at a workers strike with about fifty people and there were just as many cops.

Yes, the crowd was 99% white but the same could be said for most anti-war rallies I’ve been to at the Capitol. Throughout an hour of wading through the crowd, I had the chance to speak with three or four people. They were obviously right leaning and although many of them claim to be independents, they clearly focus their anger on Democrats. In general, there was a friendly tone to the conversations I had. We agreed where we could (yup, Democrats suck) and disagreed as well (no, immigrants are not ruining the country). Mostly, folks complained about taxes and there was a lot of talk about the Constitution (most admitted they hadn’t read it) and how Obama is a Socialist (again, he isn’t). The middle-aged small business owner I spoke with said he was not against welfare but against “people who abuse the welfare system.” I asked him why he thought electing these same crooked politicians from both sides would change anything and he sheepishly said “What else is there? I have to have faith”. During a conversation with an elderly couple who were explaining to me that “Obama was not what the founding fathers had in mind”, the crowd started bellowing the pledge of allegiance in unison which made it difficult to focus.

Basically, my final analysis of the event is that the Tea Party is MoveOn.org for the Right. Although I somewhat agree with Chomsky’s assessment that the Tea Party is a failure of the left to reach out and organize with them, at this point, I think the chance to redirect that anger has long since passed. Here were a bunch of angry people, angry at the government (at least the Democratic arm) and the Left was nowhere to be found. Unfortunately, Fox News, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin were more than happy to welcome them with open arms. So here we are.

By Alice Volcano

I visited the Tea Party protest at the state capitol this past Thursday—mainly to see what folks would show up, what signs they would be holding, what the speakers would be saying, what the counter-demos might look like.

The first thing I noticed were a bunch of white “middle-class” looking folk. I started running around looking at all the signs—taking photos of the most creative and/or inflammatory ones. While I was taking a photo of one particular sign (the one that displays Obama as a caricature with huge ears and money stuffed in them), the sign-holder and I realized we knew each other from back in the beginning of the millennium when we both worked in the same shopping complex. He was the groundskeeper and I worked in the coffee shop. We would exchange goods- I’d give him free coffee and he’d help me take out the trash and taught me how to sharpen my knife.

My friends (two men) and I stood up somewhere in the middle/front of the crowd listening to the speakers and just generally looking around, trying to get a sense of what the protesters are like—not wanting to rely on some liberal pundits who deem all the Tea Party protesters racists and Nazis.

Two men (and their wives, to an extent) turned around and took up conversations with my two male comrades (their stories are interwoven into this narrative). I stood there for a while, very used to feeling invisible or like an “accessory” at events such as these. Or I should say, to be more accurate, feeling like an accessory (or all together invisible) when there are older men talking about important things that I couldn’t possibly understand (ß sarcasm!).

I may have looked “blasé”—but I was listening to every word these folks were saying (I often find myself dealing with this type of sexism in this way. I’m not saying it’s helping anything, but hey—I do what I can). It was fun finding all the agreements I held with these folks. They want to have decision-making power over institutions and events that affect their communities—their lives. So do I! They don’t want “representatives” in Washington making decisions for them. Neither do I! They laugh at the US being considered a “democracy”—a better word for it is a “Republic.” I agree! Why filter money through Washington just to have it come back to your communities with hoops to jump through, not to mention missing about 20%? I don’t know! Hey, politicians are just money-hungry corporation lackeys! I think so, too!

Needless to say, our agreements ended there. The folks we were talking to (or I should say, the folks I was listening to) really (really) believe that Obama is a socialist. Even though socialism refers to the means of production being owned by the workers themselves, not just somewhat “socialized” health care or public schools and fire departments (libraries, etc…). They all love Ayn Rand—a woman who has written entire novels about her love affair with the “free” market. When we noted that most everyone was white (including ourselves), one of the protesters pointed to a man with a tan and said “He’s kind of colored!” Good grief.

I’ve talked to a slew of radicals and anti-authoritarians about the TPM and there are a bunch of different viewpoints. Some feel like we should be making common ground with these folks—this is, after all, a popular uprising that is critiquing our government. Some other arguments are that these folks are critiquing the same institutions that anarchists and other radicals are. I don’t agree that we are critiquing the same institutions such as: white-supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, nation-states, heterosexism, etc… These folks, from what I gathered, don’t really give a fuck about other folks’ plights. If they’re OK, then that’s all that matters. One thing I love about anarchism is the understanding that my freedom and happiness is bound up with everyone else’s. “No one is free until everyone is free.” I think the slogan the TPM may employ is something more like “I want my freedom at the cost of anything, even yours.” Anarchism is an ethic—a notion that we can live differently—we can live in ways that fulfill all of our needs and desires. This would include a free and participatory society—free of all institutionalized hierarchies—a world that would allow all of us to develop and live out our desires and lives in beautiful and joyous ways. None of that is possible within nation-states, under capitalism, nor under any other form of domination and control.

When there is a populist movement budding that critiques the power of our government—that is the time for the Left to organize and help provide an understanding of how all power is connected and to offer up alternative institutions free of domination. We missed our chance to provide a framework with which to understand how to connect the dots. I’m not sure if it’s too late or not—but I do believe that the TPM is leaning so far Right due to the fact that there is no organized Left to speak of in the US as of late. As anarchists, I think we should probably try to find the folks that do have genuine critiques of how our society is (dis)organized and we should be able to offer up alternatives. There will be no revolution by anarchists alone. We need a popular movement and we are failing miserably.

Click here to download the MP3

The new campaign slogan for the Permanent Commission on the Status of Women certainly gets right to the point. And if anyone is unconvinced of their assertion, then I wish you could have attended Women’s Day at the Capital on Tuesday.  Invited speakers and the public submitted testimony on Tuesday and called attention to many issues like health care, domestic violence and protection, education, employment, women in politics, and childcare.  Two high school students from the Young Women’s Leadership Program essay contest also read their winning essays which focused on breaking the cycle of domestic violence and the need for more women in leadership positions.

Women’s Day was really more just like the morning which was noted by two young women sitting behind me who discussed why there wasn’t a day full of activities.  Ironically, these two left a bit before noon but I internally hoped that was because they were heading over to Trinity College for their program on reproductive health “I had an illegal abortion: telling my story” at 12:15pm.  These women also noted the lack of diversity in the room.  True, most of the women there were white, well dressed and in 40+ age category.  There were several men in attendance.  The attorney general, a male photographer, the father of one essay contest winner, and two men who sat at the center table.  They didn’t have the appropriate name cards so I couldn’t find out who they were.  The morning must have been a bit boring for them because one left about an hour into the testimony and the other looked like he was sleeping.  After studying him for a few moments I noticed that it wasn’t because he was sleeping that he was so still, it was because he was typing on his phone…possibly updating his twitter page as a call for action on these women’s issues?

When one woman noted that the medical field has historically been dominated by females as midwives and mothers and it wasn’t until you could get paid $300k a year that men started taking over, the room erupted with laughter.  It wasn’t all jokes though, and Executive Director Teresa Younger took that very seriously.  I internally applauded Younger when she shushed two female political leaders talking during the testimony of Dr. Stefanie Chambers, which focused on the effect the recession had on women.

Younger has every right to be tense about this day.  For the second year, Governor Rell is calling for the elimination of the (Permanent) Commission on the Status of Women (which has been around for 37 years) in the state’s proposed budget.  Younger fought back last year and managed to save the commission but with a 65% cut in budget which eliminated half of the staff.  Community organizers presenting testimony also talked about the need to have the commission.  Several years ago a women’s clinic in New London faced closure due to funding. The PCSW stepped in to provide support and saved the clinic.

Enjoy this sprinkling of statistics from the morning!

- White women make .77 cents on the dollar compared to male counterparts while African American women make .70 cents and Latina women make .62 cents.

- 56% of medical bankruptcy filers are women.

- 1 in 7 women put off their annual obgyn appointment because of cost.

- Our current state childcare licenses can only care for 40% of children under the age of 5.

- Less than 4% of women serving on state commissions and boards are women of color.

- 80% of philanthropy is given by women, but only 10% of that reaches girls.

- 1 in 8 women are diagnosed with breast cancer, which is the 2^nd leading cause of death for women behind lung cancer.  The risk of getting the cancer is lower in African American women but are 35% more likely to die from the disease then white women because of financial barriers.

- Women spend 68% more on health care then men because of reproductive health.

Click here to download the MP3

Among the list of line-item victims are Urban Oaks Organic Farm, Americorps, Ansonia Nature Center, AIDS Interfaith Network, Children of Incarcerated Parents, youth centers, DOC distance learning, pilot asthma awareness, Manchester food pantries, and a youth/substance abuse project in Bridgeport. A complete list of earmarks to be cut is available here (Excel format).

Environmental, educational, and health interests will be among the biggest losers when the budget officially takes effect next week.

CT News Junkie has additional coverage of the losers and winners with this budget.

Photo credit: rbglasson http://www.flickr.com/photos/rbglasson/3505347521/

RadioActive hosts a community roundtable discussion evaluating Barack Obama’s first six months in office.

Click here to download the MP3