Dear Readers -

 

Thank you for visiting the 40yearplan.com

I will be posting most of my work now at kenkrayeske.com until we can rebuild this site. It is extensive and large and unwieldy for me to post to via dreamweaver.

In the meantime, I will leave this site up with its extensive archive. See you at kenkrayeske.com

Dear Congressman Larson -

 

A year goes by quickly. Last October, you and I were wrestling for votes as we were both fighting for your Congressional seat. During our grueling debate schedule, several times you championed clean natural gas as an alternative energy source.

 

You said we should listen to your friend billionaire T. Boone Pickens about relying more on natural gas.

 

After you won re-election, in March 2011, you made good on your promises, and introduced the NAT GAS Act (New Alternative Transportation to Give Americans Solutions), which gives incentives for natural gas powered vehicles.

 

It's funny, though, last night (October 18) about a dozen of us gathered at La Paloma Sabanera on Capital Avenue in Hartford for the Tuesday night Keno Café to watch a special presentation of Gasland, the documentary about hydrofracking made by Josh Fox in 2010.

 

We thought of you, because midway during the movie, Fox tries to get in touch with your friend T. Boone Pickens. And Pickens never responds.

 

Perhaps Pickens knew Fox was a muckraker, more than Fox knew he was a muckraker. But I started thinking you might connect Fox and Pickens so they can converse about hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, for short.

 

If you haven't heard of Gasland, the movie explores problems associated with fracking. Fox traces how the 2005 energy bill pushed by Vice president Dick Cheney exempted fracking from the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act, among a dozen other environmental and safety regulations.

 

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By the time you read this column, Troy Davis may be dead. My deadline is 1 p.m. on Wednesday, September 21, 2011. Six hours later, Troy Davis is scheduled to be executed for a crime we cannot be sure he committed.

 

Davis has been on death row for a bit more than two decades, convicted of the 1989 slaying of a police officer in a fast food restaurant parking lot. Late at night. Since the trial seven of the nine eyewitnesses have recanted their testimony, saying they were coerced.

 

Of the remaining two eyewitnesses, one – who first fingered Davis, could also have been the triggerman. Davis has always maintained his innocence. Don’t they all? But no physical evidence has ever existed to link Davis to the crime.

 

For me, though, my opposition to the death penalty does not focus on guilt. Whether or not Troy Davis is guilty, the state of Georgia should not execute him. History will judge us even more harshly should he be innocent.

 

The justice system that found him guilty I have no confidence in, especially when he is black, and in Savannah, Georgia. The civil rights movement has long since seen its heyday, racism is not vestigial in the south. It remains more cleverly disguised, and strong among those practitioners of hatred.

 

I spent this past weekend in Atlanta, Georgia, on a short family vacation. I had some time to kill Friday afternoon before our evening’s activity, and I wandered from the hotel to Congressman John Lewis’ office, on the 19th floor of an office building.

 

Congressman Lewis, with his proud history as a civil rights marcher, is a staunch death penalty opponent. As a federal representative, though, he is powerless to stop the murder of Davis. I still left him a note begging him to work harder, and use his political finesse to give Davis a reprieve.

 

From there, I meandered over to the Georgia state capital, a gold-domed structure, hardly as pretty as our own. The Office of Governor Nathan Deal was quiet a few minutes before quitting time on Friday afternoon.

 

The governor’s office in Georgia is powerless to stop an execution, as the Board of Pardons and Paroles retains sole authority to grant clemency in such cases as Troy Davis’. Nevertheless, I scribbled out another note to Governor Deal, again, protesting the use of such barbaric punishment, especially in a case where guilt is hard to measure.

 

The receptionist in the Governor’s office, a kindly young woman with shoulder length blond hair and two different color fingernail polishes, said she would relay my note to the Governor’s constituent services office, where many thousands of other similar such comments from all over the world were being catalogued.

 

Should Troy Davis be dead when you read this, his life was not lived in vain. More than a million people around the world protested his death. The board of Pardons and Paroles received 600,000 signatures petitioning the state to spare Troy Davis’ life. These appeals fell on deaf ears.

 

But the efforts to rescue Davis from death row show exactly how out of step the United States is globally. The U.S. is the only western industrial democracy that regularly executes its perpetrators of crime.

 

When an American state outlaws the death penalty, the Italians light up the Roman coliseum in honor of the recognition of the sacredness of life. I want to be in Rome when the Italians do that for Connecticut.

 

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It has been a few weeks since the state of Georgia wrongly executed Troy Davis. And despite this, it seems support for capital punishment grows in Connecticut engages in the death penalty porn trial of Joshua Komisarjevsky.

 

The murder trial of Komisarjevsky could have been avoided – he agreed to plead guilty to murder for life in prison, to avoid certain death. But the populace of Connecticut clearly has a blood lust.

 

Turning on the radio two weeks ago, I heard on WPLR Chaz and AJ playing the confession of Komisarjevsky for the drive time listeners. They warned children out of the room. They said they were the only ones who were going to play it on the air because everyone else was afraid to confront it.

 

I felt like it bordered on necrophiliac voyeurism to air Komisarjevsky’s confession and details of the murders. I turned it off.

 

Does it add anything to the debate to listen to this man’s darkest hour of telling exactly how he killed? Does it make us a better society to feed the violent visions in our head with Komisarjevsky’s tales of murder?

 

Nor did I need to hear Chaz and AJ call for the murder of Komisarjevsky and Hayes. Sometimes I feel a little lonely being a death penalty opponent when the entire tide of the Nutmeg state seems to fantasize about revenge on Komisarjevsky and Hayes.

 

Browsing through Facebook, I find it unsettling to see people of all stripe want an eye for an eye, and to imagine scenarios where Hayes and Komisarjevsky suffer the same fate they inflicted on others. One cute little grandmother posted “Fry their asses now why wait 10 to 20 years ?”

 

A forty-something fisherman: “They should receive the same type of death as they dished out. Except with onlookers.”

 

Another man: “They should hang that SOB on a hook and have Dr.Petit beat him like a pinata with a bat then have the grandparents tie him to a bed and set his fn ass on fire.”

 

A woman who went to Catholic high school with me: “Agreed. 100% ! You know there are ppl out there that think they should get a fair trial.”

 

Another woman: “you are right....the police should have shot them both on scene...what bothers me is why why why do they have to broadcast the horrific acts to those poor children and mom on national tv....keep it in the court room and no where else...

 

Same woman: “Put them on the Cheshire Green and everyone turn a blind eye and let Dr. Petit kill them....I understand that is not a christian thing to feel but they are pure EVIL...they make me physically ill...and very sad.”

 

I responded: “The death penalty is cruel, inhumane and not a punishment that we should mete out in a civilized society. I understand that many people are upset by hearing the monstrous actions taken by Hayes and Komijarevsky.

 

“Human beings can be monsters, and all history is witness to this cruelty man is capable of. Both Hayes and Komijarevsky would have pled guilty in exchange for life sentences. Instead, the state of Connecticut has chosen to drag us all through this nightmare of hearing intimate details of insane murder to satisfy bloodlust and vengeance.

 

“I understand the raw emotional power these crimes generate, and I know that my stance here is probably not appreciated. Yet when we as a society determine that we should hold the power of death over the perpetrators of these crimes, we sink to their level, and are no better than the murderers themselves.”

 

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Hartford native Elizabeth May is now the first Green Party member of Parliament elected to the Canadian national Parliament.

 

This makes May the first Green Party legislator on a national scale in North America.

 

Canadian democracy supports multiple parties, so it is not uncommon that a third-party legislator would be elected. Were it only possible in America. May won her seat in Parliament on May 2, 2011, and on August 6, she addressed via Skype the United States’ Green Party national convention at Alfred College in Alfred, New York.

 

May acknowledged the difficult path that the U.S. Green Party and its affiliates face. May is familiar with the republican-style of democracy in America, as she was born in Hartford on June 9, 1954 to a British father and an American mother.

 

She attended the Renbrook School and Miss Porter’s School. Her family moved to Nova Scotia in 1972. May graduated law school in 1983, and her environmental activism during the ensuing two and a half decades propelled her to the election.

 

May was at one time the executive director of the Canadian Sierra Club. In the video call to the Green Party gathering, May described how she received $2.4 million in public financing for her campaign. Weeks prior to the election in her British Columbia riding (the term for district), May had more than 2,000 volunteers lined up, knocking doors.

 

May was not included in national debates, but her success from the previous election, in which she nearly won her seat, certainly helped her. In 2008, May only earned 12,620 votes. This year, May won with 31,900 votes, besting the incumbent Conservative by more than 5,500 votes.

 

The impact of not being in the leaders’ debates, though, was visible, as the Canadian Green Party’s overall showing decreased from 1 million votes in 2008 to 500,000 this past election. This effects the Greens there because the way public campaign financing works there, parties get $1 for every vote.

 

This meant the Greens got some $2 million in 2010 and 2011. Candidates cannot accept more than $1,100 from any individual. Additionally, the Canadian government reimburses the Greens for 60 percent of what they spend in any election. And being an elected Green makes a difference in Parliament, May said, even though she is the only Green in Parliament.

 

Continued here...

 

Disclosure: Alan Bisbort is a friend. I am writing this column about an art exhibit featuring his work, and interviewing him taught me about him, art and the world. In the effort of transparency, I have known Alan for years, and will attempt to practice disinterested and objective journalism in this week's column. But I like Bisbort and his ideas, so this is a one source story only interviewing him.

 

The late Donald Barthelme, that celebrated poet and author, wrote in his posthumous 1997 tome Dealing With Not-Knowing: ''The principle of collage is the central principle of all art in the 20th century."

 

The very much alive Alan Bisbort, freelance writer, editor and collage artist, agrees.

 

"Collage most evokes what it is like to live now," Bisbort said. "Collage serves a function psychologically ala Freud, where you manipulate the world around us to suit our personality and view of the world. There is an element of positive wish fulfillment."

 

Bisbort has been making collages for more than 30 years, and his skill has naturally developed. "If you do anything long enough, you get good at it," he said.

 

The zenith of Bisbort's amateur career as a collage artist will begin Thursday, September 1, at 5:30 p.m. when the Charter Oak Cultural Center opens an exhibit of Bisbort's collages of Time magazine covers from 2011. The exhibit will run through September 23.

 

The exhibit will be set up like a newsstand, with all the covers on one wall.

 

Bisbort bought a cheap subscription to Time magazine and every week this year, he has been making collages out of the covers, using only the images from inside the magazine.

 

And Bisbort's career will peak again in February 2012, when the Thomas J. Dodd Research Library at the University of Connecticut in Storrs will display the entire run of all 52 Time cover collages.

 

Continued here...

Preamble to the Weekly Column

In the fiction of corporate personhood, a business becomes a person when proper paperwork is delivered to the Secretary of the State.

 

Often times, Delaware or other states with easy corporate formation laws engender this process for property to become person (the inverse of slavery, wherein a person is property, but nevermind).

 

Once “born”, the company must register to do business in the state that it actually resides in. If not, that company will be an “illegal alien” subject to fines and certain types of legal liability.

 

The Weekly Column

 

As it happens in Connecticut and everywhere else, there is always an exception to the rule of the mighty language of the joint press release and the bombast of the press conference; a vulnerability that can reduce articulate politicos to a weak “no comment.”

 

The trick, of course, is finding that exception to the press conference rule. Sometimes, that takes months to do, and a good backstory that is far too difficult to comprehend or in depth for media outlets like Fox-61 to put on the air.

 

Last week, on August 4, 2011 your humble scribe found that vulnerability and perhaps spoiled the presser by Secretary of the State Denise Merrill and Attorney General George Jepsen celebrating their collection of more than $1.3 million in fines from about 330 out-of-state companies operating in Connecticut without registering.

 

In advance of the presser, the language of Merrill’s press release staked a “take no prisoners” approach. Merrill’s quote: “We have zero tolerance for business practices that take advantage of Connectiocut consumers and or businesses who do play by the rules.”

 

The press release also quoted Paulette Scarpetti, the president of the Connecticut Better Business Bureau: “I don’t know why any company or individual would choose not to register … There is no reason why any company or individual should be doing business illegally in the state of Connecticut.”

 

The press conference presented a room full of white people, mostly men in suits. I was wondering why there were no people of color, then I realized that it was journalists, attorneys and constitutional officers of the state of Connecticut. Why would I think diversity exists in these professions?

 

At the presser, the hot air filled the room, and Merrill, Jepsen and BBB spokesman Howard Schwartz hit their talking points.

 

Schwartz: People should have second thoughts about doing business with unregistered companies. “Is it wise to do business with unregistered companies?” he said.

 

Merrill: “This is a national issue. This is a consumer protection accountability issue.”

 

I like Denise Merrill, as she was a hard working, progressive legislator. I know she means well. But sometimes when you rise to a level of power, that position prevents you from speaking your mind.

 

Continue to full story...

This week sees the resurrection of an old 40-Year Plan favorite, the awarding of the Frankie.

 

Only elected officials who grossly abuse the Franking Privilege – the ability to send mail to constituents on the taxpayer dime – earn Frankies.

 

It has been quite some time since we awarded a Frankie, largely because perennial Frankie honoree Mayor Eddie Perez has been convicted, and has not been sending those obnoxious four-color flyers.

 

Ahh, but Perez taught his mentees well, and the winner of this special Frankie for Toeing Line of Unethical and Illegal is (drumroll, please) Kelvin Roldan, Democratic State Representative from the fourth district in Hartford.

 

About three weeks ago, Roldan used taxpayer monies to send out a simple black and white 8.5” x 5.5” postcard touting his success in “Job Creation Measures.” Trust me, if Roldan did anything worthwhile on job creation, it would have been news, and he wouldn’t need a frank to tell you what he’s been up to.

 

The only news Roldan made recently was a day on the Hartford Courant’s web cycle as a hypocrite. Roldan and his side-kick attacked Mayor Segarra for an alleged conflict of interest. (Conflict of interest disclaimer – my fiancé works in Mayor Segarra’s administration, and I abstain from covering the Mayor’s office).

 

But please, dear reader, recall Roldan’s deafening silence during the torturous fall of Perez. Roldan said nothing when everyone and their brother called for Perez's resignation. Or think of Roldan’s silence on state Rep. Hector Robles dishonor.

 

Why does Roldan remain mum about Robles’ termination as a cop and arrest on theft charges and refusal to resign from elective office? If you’re going to call ethics on one person, call ethics equally on everyone. To challenge one enemy on ethics and not any allies abuses honor as a hammer for political gain. This rank opportunism is one reason citizens and columnists loathe politicians like Roldan.

 

When Roldan came out against Segarra, he was posturing for a run at city-wide office. Which office, we couldn’t be sure. With last week’s announcement, he says he wants to be City Treasurer. We should trust Roldan in the City Treasurer’s office like we might trust Paul Silvester. Not. Ever. Never.

 

And this is why Roldan wins the Frankie for Toeing the Line of Unethical and Illegal. Roldan knew he was running for office. He has been angling for new office for a long time. Yet he sent out campaign literature disguised as a frank just in time to skirt the line on the franking laws and avoid a complaint to the State Elections Enforcement Commission.

 

State law sets the rules. Specifically, Connecticut General Statutes Section 9-610(d)(1) says: “No incumbent holding office shall, during the three months preceding an election in which he is a candidate for reelection or election to another office, use public funds to mail or print flyers or other promotional materials intended to bring about his election or reelection.”

 

Eddie Perez took a lump on Sec. 9-610(d)(1) at least once. It is clear: no franking 90 days before an election. Ahhh, but the mayoral primary isn’t until September 13, so 90 days is June 13 give or take, and Roldan beat that by about a week. Legal. But ethical? He has been mulling a run for office for months. He knew it, but is within the letter of the law. Or is he?

 

If this was a state election, he'd be in violation of C.G.S. Sec. 2-15a. The legislature imposed a July 15, or 120 days before the election deadline for franking privileges on itself in even-numbered years. For me, Roldan deserves ignominy for abusing taxpayer monies to send his weak resume to voters prior to an election, when we are cutting state jobs and benefits everywhere. Bad use of tax money.

 

No other legislators I know have sent out a frank recently. I didn’t get one in my district from Rep. Doug McCrory or Sen. Eric Coleman. But they're not running for city office, are they? The info Roldan shared with constituents hardly impacts the daily lives of those grinding out the poverty of the Second Great Depression in Hartford.

 

Full article...

T he jury came back with its verdict in about 30 minutes: the Hartford police officer who arrested me at Gov. M. Jodi Rell’s Inaugural parade on January 3, 2007 did not violate any federal statutes, and had probable cause to arrest me for any crime.

 

Four and a half years of hard work – blood, toil, sweat and tears - I put into my false arrest lawsuit, only to watch it disappear before my attorney could finish a cup of tea.

 

My attorney and I and some helpful friends spent two days on trial last week in the Bridgeport federal district court, prosecuting my two remaining claims – false arrest and free speech retaliation. I didn’t win either count.

 

I expected this verdict, but hoped against it. Other lawyers and the judge warned me I should settle. But I wanted an apology, a recognition that what Hartford police conspired to do and did in fact do to me on January 3, 2007 was beyond the pale of a free society.

 

What happened to me was a police state moment, and the jury accepted it. Perhaps they felt bad that the Defendant was getting thrown under the bus by a dozen other cops.

 

Perhaps my evidence – witnesses including an attorney and a middle-aged woman with no ax to grind and my photographs – was insufficient. Video didn’t work for Rodney King. Why should I be any different? But I had to try, because the precedent is too dangerous for liberty.

 

In mid-March, at a settlement conference, I rejected $20,000.00 and a public statement “we are glad to put this episode behind us” from the City of Hartford. The City indemnifies its officers. The cop wasn’t paying. This was coming from taxpayers. But I didn’t want it.

 

Without an apology from the City, money meant nothing. Without an apology, I had no choice but to persevere to trial. I understood my slim chances, considering the pro-police sentiment among the public, and considering how the judge restricted the evidence.

 

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Ten Connecticut billionaires have a combined net wealth of $30.3 billion dollars. The richest man in the state, Steve Cohen, 55, is a hedge fund king from Greenwich worth $8 billion, according to Forbes Magazine.

 

The state of Connecticut has a $3.3 billion budget deficit for this coming year, according to Gov. Dannel Malloy.  If we took half of Cohen’s net worth, $4 billion, we wouldn’t have to worry about taxing anyone who makes $50,000 an extra $500 a year.

 

People in Meriden liked this idea of taxing billionaires when I presented it to Gov. Malloy at the “Town Hall” meeting on Tuesday, March 15 at the Lincoln Middle School in Meriden.

 

Yet Malloy has been relentlessly pushing this idea of taxing a middle class earner who makes $50,000 a year an extra $500 a year. I have trouble swallowing that, when I don’t see how Cohen would miss $4 billion, considering he would still have $4 billion, which is enough money to run the city of Hartford for eight years, give or take.

 

But I can’t seem to get politicians to buy into the idea of confiscating large portions of wealth owned by the super rich. I wasn’t the only one telling Malloy to tax wealth, plenty of people at Malloy’s packed town hall in Meriden Tuesday night fully engaged the concept of soaking the millionaires.

 

After reading the news accounts of Malloy’s meeting the night before in Bristol, I understood that only 16 people might get questions in. I tried to get there early, say, 6:15, but at that point, the line was already 25 deep.

 

First in line was Julissa Antigua, a senior from Wilcox Tech in Meriden. She arrived at 5:20 pm.  “It is important that my voice is heard,” she said. She saved her friend Samantha Roccappriore a spot in line, too.

 

Both young ladies, who study culinary arts, oppose Malloy’s plan to give the state operated technical schools to the towns in which they reside. 

 

“I care a lot about the technical school system,” Antigua said. She had few ideas about closing the budget. I asked if she thought the billionaires could pay their share. She wasn’t sure.

 

“I guess rich people are more fortunate than others,” Antigua said.

 

More students from Wilcox Tech dominated the start of the line. Mixed in between them were activists of all stripe, advocating for the environment, unions, corporate responsibility, hair care and health care.

 

Cathy Pecor of Durham has been a hairdresser for 30 years. She arrived at 5:10 pm to get her fifth spot in line. She charges $22 for a woman’s haircut. She has to pay $823 monthly for health insurance. That is a lot of haircuts.

 

She opposes Malloy’s proposal to tax haircuts via the sales tax. I would agree, for different reasons. The sales tax is regressive and disproportionately impacts the poor. Pecor said it will put her out of business because haircuts will go underground.

 

“People will start cutting hair in their houses,” she said. She would be happier if the state let her buy into its Blue Cross/Blue Shield health care plan. She also lamented the difficult future awaiting young people who take out $19,000 in student loans to learn how to cut hair.   

Continue Reading...

Somewhere in a Hartford, a high school student shivered through last night because his single father couldn’t afford the $1,000 it takes to fill the oil tank to heat his house.

 

The father is among America’s working poor. He has a “full-time” job that only lets him work 32 hours a week, which prevents him from the full-time status of benefits. At least he has a job, right?

 

In school today, the child will be poorly prepared because he was too cold to concentrate on his homework.  He might nap during class, and his teachers will think he is slacking off.

 

Some of the teachers probably wouldn’t understand the dad’s predicament: he owns a house but can’t afford to heat it, and can’t find help to pay the bills. They might wonder why the dad isn’t out hustling more. It is a man’s duty to provide for his kids, right?

 

If the dad is lucky, the pipes won’t freeze and he won’t lose running water.

 

The student’s teachers are mandated to report child abuse and neglect, so if he told his teachers the truth that his dad is attempting to keep him warm by using the stove, his teachers would probably have to report it to the state Department of Children and Families.

 

But poverty is not a reason to punish parents, at least according to what new DCF chief and former state Supreme Court justice Joette Katz has said. I was relieved to hear Katz say this on WNPR’s “Where We Live” a few weeks back.

 

Yet how can DCF reach out to this mom and her child and help them? DCF does not provide home heating assistance. In fact, the previous Republican governor attempted to cut home heating assistance.

 

Clearly, whatever monies were in the program were not enough. But how do we get more resources to our poor to help them succeed?

 

Somewhere in Hartford, a Governor is calling for shared sacrifice and an austerity budget to cut the deficit because previous governments spent beyond the state’s means.

 

The Governor has called himself a fiscal conservative, more conservative than previous Republican governors. Yet he claims to be a Democrat. According to models of American political thought, his Democratic label makes him a “liberal.”

 

Being a liberal might indicate that this Governor is aware of the intense poverty facing residents of his state’s capitol city, and that this Governor is concerned about how to ameliorate those badges and incidences of poverty.

 

But I doubt that to this Governor, shared sacrifice means that those who live in Avon or Wilton in 5,000 square foot homes should go a night or two without heat. Just to see how it feels, right?

 

Certainly, to this Governor, shared sacrifice doesn’t mean the millionaire in Avon should pay their proportionate share of income taxes.

 

This Governor has inherited a state income tax that is more regressive than most other states, according to liberal activist Jon Pelto and studies by the watchdog group Connecticut Voices for Children. And there appear to be no plans to change that imbalance.

 

“The lack of appropriate tax rate tiers means that Connecticut families who make $30,000 per year are taxed at the same rate as those making $900,000. This means middle and lower income families are disproportionately burdened,” Pelto wrote in his February 7, 2011 column for the New Haven Advocate.

 

So our dad above, who maybe ekes out $30,000 a year at her 32 hour a week job and whatever side jobs he can find, pays between 10 percent of his income in state taxes. If he makes less than $30,000, he possibly pays 12 percent.

 

Connecticut’s rich pay 4.9 percent. Pelto reported that Connecticut is home to 10,000 people who make more than a million smackeroos a year. But we only tax them at half the rate we tax those in lower income stratas.

 

Somewhere in Hartford, a legislator who works for the school system just took a bonus that is large enough to fill that mother’s oil tank seven times.

 

At least one member of the City Council has called for the Superintendent who gave that bonus to resign.

 

This columnist is calling for those who took bonuses to give them back. The children clearly need the money more than they do.

 

Somewhere in Hartford, there is a college student living at home with her single mom. The college student has to study in the library all night because her mom can’t afford to pay the electric bill.

 

The mom has a job working as a teacher’s assistant in a Hartford elementary school. But this salary is hardly enough to pay the bills. At least they have a roof over their heads, right?

 

If the student graduates and walks across the stage, it should be a moment of immense pride, because of what the young woman has had to overcome. But why do we make children climb these mountains?

 

Somewhere in Hartford, important, smart people are gathering to discuss how to fix problems, like how to sell wine with gift baskets. Seriously.

 

House Bill 6267, introduced by the General Law Committee, will establish a gift basket retailer permit to allow for the retail sale of wine with gift baskets, subject to certain restrictions.

 

It was ready for action by the House of Representatives on March 9, 2011. This bill ended up in front of the house because it is good for commerce, and because monied people interested in making more money by selling wine with gift baskets had to ability to get the bill raised and to a vote.

 

Our single dad and our single mom are too worried about feeding their children to be politically active. If they were in politics, and they ran for office and tried to tell their stories, people would say to them, why are you trying to change things politically when your own house isn’t in order? How can you waste time running for office when you can’t pay your bills?

 

People would look down on them because they have tried to use the political system to gain resources (wealth) without actually doing the work.

 

But who in power in the legislature is looking out for their interests? The wheels of commerce get more legal grease than the children who are ground beneath the wheels.

 

And remember that our single parents are working. The 32-hour a week job is an attempt to skirt labor laws and enrich the bottom line, at the expense of this child.

 

Our single parents are trying to find the American dream, and put their children in a better position than they are, or were. But it just keeps getting tougher every day.

 

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Now, Ted Williams' intentional pay cut in 1959 seems astounding, unbelievable, almost unfathomable.

 

Back in 1959, when the Boston Red Sox offered an aging Williams $125,000 - the highest salary ever at the time - Williams demurred. He said he had a lousy year, and took $90,000 instead to renew his contract.

 

The pendulum swings the other way, too. In 1930, when asked by a reporter why he made $5,000 more a year than President Herbert Hoover, Babe Ruth replied, "I know, but I had a better year than Hoover."

 

Fast forward to Connecticut, where UConn basketball coach Jim Calhoun is in the throes of a pretty bad year, given that he just got sanctioned by the NCAA for recruiting violations, and for failing to create a culture of compliance.

 

Can Calhoun say he is having a better year than Governor Dannel P. Malloy, who makes 10 percent of Calhoun's monster salary? Should Calhoun pull a Ted Williams? Should Calhoun hear Governor Malloy's February 16, 2011 call for "shared sacrifice" to close the state's $3.67 billion budget gap?

 

In real terms, the $3.67 billion is about what the Pentagon spends in less than a week in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. So I'm no fan of the austerity measures and budget cuts that have the potential to destroy civil society here so we can wage war abroad.

 

Hey, if Calhoun would take a civil disobedience arrest to help end the war, then pay him a million or more. We could maybe afford it then. Yet the national hollowing out of state budgets forgets the fundamental problem - that federal aid has dried up to finance wars of imperial aggression.

 

This talk of austerity must be conservative demigod Grover Norquist's dream - making government so small that you can drown it in a bathtub. And while Gov. Malloy uses a smaller stick than Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, who wants to destroy the collective bargaining rights of unions altogether, Malloy's budget goes after state worker wages.

 

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Surprisingly, members of Hartford’s leftist community watch the Super Bowl. At this party, a few of us managed to ignore the corporate speech between football plays and converse about issues small and large.

A friend is retiring this week, and he plans to spend some time writing a book about social movements. I told him that I had written a paper in law school on social movement theory, centered on the universal right to education.

 

He agreed that education merited an important role in the debate of how to shape the nation, but he countered that jobs were more important. And there aren’t enough of them to go around.

 

And there won’t be any for a while, at least according to a story titled “No Rush to Hire Even as Profits Soar” in the Tuesday, February 8, 2011 Wall Street Journal. The story, by John Shipman and Joe Light, stated corporate profits in America are rising, but companies aren’t hiring. 

 

Earnings are up 28% from a year ago for 73% of the companies in Standard-and-Poor’s 500-stock index. Profits are up because companies relied on “aggressive job cuts,” the Journal said.  Pleased with improved profits, they are “in no hurry to add to their payrolls.”

 

This, my loyal readers, is the jobless recovery. One would be foolish to think that corporations can harvest so much money from us without facing consequences for not hiring. Or would one be?

 

My friend at the Super Bowl party argued we are overeducated now, and social movement theory should focus on jobs.

 

Too many students in America have an education, but nowhere to work. Student loans create pressure not just on the graduates, but on the economy, he warned.

 

The student loan bubble may pop, he said.  He might be right. Student loans now amount to the largest type of debt in America, outranking home mortgage debt and consumer credit debt.

 

Student loans represent easily obtainable credit: you can get them for cosmetology school or culinary institutes, neither of which guarantee a great income. But then again, nor does a bachelor’s degree guarantee a great income anymore.

 

Finally, banks may think student loans are guaranteed investments because Congress back in President Clinton’s day made student loans non-dischargeable in bankruptcy. Special thanks to corporate water-carrier Speaker of the House John Boehner on that one.

 

So it seems possible banks which underwrite student loans like Chase or Citigroup, which are already laden with toxic assets will suffer further issues with their bottom line when students begin defaulting on a massive basis because there are no jobs.

 

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Wealthy football booster Robert G. Burton, Sr. wrote his now infamous letter to the University of Connecticut on the letterhead of a company, Burton Capital Management, LLC, that is not currently registered to transact business in the state of Connecticut.

 

Today, Av Harris, spokesman for Secretary of the State Denise Merrill, confirmed yesterday's finding by the40yearplan.com that Burton Capital Management, LLC is not registered with the Secretary's office, and is not in the SOTS' online CONNCord database.

 

The Secretary of State's Office will send a letter to Burton Capital Management, LLC to determine whether or not it is transacting business illegally in the state, Harris said.

 

"I can't give you an answer right now whether they are transacting business in Connecticut without authority because we have to do interrogatories," Harris said. "We will send out the letter in a week."

 

There are limited circumstances in which a company can have a an address in Connecticut, and not be registered to transact business with the Secretary's office, Harris said. For example, he noted that if the business was not providing services, they would not need to be registered.

 

Despite Burton Capital Management, LLC's Greenwich office, it is a Delaware limited liability company. Another Burton company from Delaware, Burton Management Group, LLC, is resgistered with the SOTS, at the same 100 Northfield Street, Greenwich appears that appears on the letter Burton sent to UConn.

 

Most foreign LLC's like that have to be registered. The interrogatories will help the Secretary determine the business' status, Harris said.

 

Unfortunately, state statute section 34-108(c), Interrogatories by the Secretary of the State, restricts public access to Burton's responses to those interrogatories, Harris said.

 

"If there is an enforcement action or a settlement, the terms of it are confidential," Harris said. So if Burton Capital Management, LLC has to pay fines, late charges or back fees, the public will not be able to know.

 

However, if Burton Capital Management, LLC has to be registered, Harris confirmed that within several months, the company's name will show up in CONNCord, the online database of companies authorized to transact business in Connecticut.

 

The 40-Year Plan will continue to monitor the situation in the future, and apprise our loyal readers if and when Burton Capital Management, LLC appears on the Secretary of State's website.

 

 

A wealthy UConn football booster had a hissy fit this week and demanded his donation back, and wants his name taken off the football complex that he helped fund.Why? Because his donation didn't give him access to the hiring process for the new football coach.

 

Since it is highly unlikely that any court would ever force UConn to disgorge the gift from Robert Burton, Sr., the more interesting aspect of the story to me is the pathology of wealth that Mr. Burton demonstrated.

 

If anyone doubts that mega-wealthy people demonstrate pathological behaviors, I point them to Thomas Frank’s Easy Chair column in the February 2011 Harper’s Magazine, “Servile Disobedience.”

 

Frank gathered the results of psychological research studies on wealthy people; for anyone who has been a deckhand on a megayacht owned by someone worth half-a-billion, the results don’t surprise.

 

Research papers published in scientific journals like Psychological Science and the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology showed that rich people have no common touch, Franks noted.

 

One study showed that when rich people talk to strangers, they tended doodle and fidget more, and give fewer engagement cues – body language that shows you’re listening. Another study showed that lower-class people performed better on measures like generosity, charity and helpfulness. One of the researchers noted that the rich seem to lack empathy.

 

Frank summarizes: “All of which is to say, the rich are different from you and me. They are ruder and less generous. They don’t get what others are thinking. And apparently, they really don’t care.”

 

After motoring halfway around the world with a 67-year-old man-child multi-millionaire on his 150-foot mega-yacht, I have no questions about how rich people see normal folk. The “Let them eat cake” line of thought didn’t end with the demise of the French monarchy.

 

If you had any doubts about the fact that the rich lack empathy, and expect power where none should be given, please, read the letter from the rich UConn donor, Mr. Burton.

 

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History’s assault on our senses begins with the blunt instrument of a calendar. Along with rejoicing at the life of the great anti-war agitator Martin Luther King, Jr., those military-weary souls among us celebrated two less happy occurrences Monday, January 17.

 

The first was the fiftieth anniversary of President Dwight D Eisenhower’s last address to the nation in 1961, his so called warning against the rise of the military industrial complex.

 

The second less celebrated moment of remembrance was the 20th anniversary of Operation Desert Storm, the early morning invasion of Iraq in 1991.

 

So it seems fitting that January 17 is also the birthday of another great anti-war hero, Muhammed Ali. The champion pugilist did time in prison instead of a tour of duty in Vietnam.

 

His famous rationale for resisting the draft: “I got nothing against no Viet Cong. No Vietnamese ever called me a nigger.”

 

If I were a student at the Waterbury Arts Magnet School, the African-American superintendant David Snead would censor this column, based on his yanking of the school play, August Wilson’s “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.” Why? It uses the n-word.

 

So, Ali’s anti-war statement is apparently unfit for the ears of American youth. Is there any anti-war sentiment that we can hear in mass culture today?

 

On Monday, NPR’s morning host Renee Montagne and NPR Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman explored Eisenhower’s speech and its core message: do we have a military-industrial complex?

 

Bowman's story begs the question: does NPR mean National Pentagon Radio? Sure, the story quotes Eisenhower’s statements about the creation of a permanent arms industry, and this concentration of power will threaten democracy.

 

Bowman mentions Lockheed Martin in passing. Bowman apparently missed William Hartung’s January 11, 2011 story about Lockheed Martin, documenting how this “military” contractor is the largest government contractor. Period.

 

Lockheed Martin received $36 billion in U.S. government contracts in 2008 alone, Hartung reported. Lockheed does work for more than two dozen agencies, including the CIA, the NSA, the FBI, the EPA, the Department of Energy, the USPS and even the Census Bureau.

 

That $36 billion equals $260 per household, Hartung said. Lockheed spent $12 million on Congressional lobbying and campaign contributions in 2009 alone. That allows it to train TSA security agents who give us pat downs in airports, and run prisons overseas.

 

Listening to NPR, I wondered A) why they didn’t bring up Hartung’s reporting, and B) why we don’t we do the opposite of privatizing with Lockheed, and make it a state run company.

 

Allowing a for-profit, private corporation to do so much business with the U.S. government seemingly puts it in a position to dominate policy. But that would get me labeled a socialist, and an enemy of the state (or Lockheed’s bottom line). It might even get me put on a terrorist watch list.

 

After NPR, I yearned for refreshing wisdom from a King or an Ali. Of course, I heard this King gem on Monday: “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

 

Of course, on January 13, 2011, some military pr hack named Terri Moon Cron, writing for defense.gov, said that MLK would support the murder in Afghanistan. Cron quoted Jeh C. Johnson, the Defense Department’s general counsel at the Pentagon’s celebration of King’s life, saying today’s wars are not out of line with King's teachings.

 

King was an ardent pacifist. Orwellian double-speak got you confused? Then you’ll love NPR’s comparing Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to his fellow Kansan Eisenhower.

 

Gates himself has questioned whether we need a navy that is larger than the next 13 battle fleets combined, 11 of which are our allies. But Gates, the Secretary of Defense for both a Republican and Democratic president, has presided over Orwellian state of permanent war in Afghanistan.

 

If you doubt that the war in Afghanistan is meant to be fought and not won, just watch Restrepo, a 2010 documentary about a year in the life of a 15 man Army platoon in a remote outpost in the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan.

 

Korengal is one of the most dangerous deployments in Afghanistan. The film takes its name from PFC Juan Restrepo of Pembroke Pines, Florida. Restrepo was a medic who was killed in action on July 22, 2007.

 

The first scenes of Restrepo show the eponymous soldier on a bus saying “You can’t tame the beast.” Cut to a live firefight in Afghanistan. “Holy s*&^, we’re not ready for this!” said one soldier.

 

The movie, directed by Sebastian Junger (A Perfect Storm) and Tim Hetherington, is a step forward for National Geographic Films, which distributed war porn/propaganda about the 2003 invasion while lamenting the destruction of priceless ancient artifacts.

 

Restrepo highlights the power of military arms. I wished the weapons manufacturers emblazoned their brand names on the guns and copters, like they do in Nascar.

 

Perhaps that might warn us of the power of the military-industrial complex, when we see Lockheed Martin’s name and slogan “We never forget who we’re working for” shining on the side of Trident missile.

 

More importantly, Restrepo shows the reality of cold, violent combat. It is unsanitized, with images of dead Americans, and their crying platoon mates. And their commanding officers telling them “I want you guys to mourn and get over it and go out and make the individuals who did this pay.”

 

The strategic value of the Korengal Valley, according to the film, is a proposed road the Americans want to build to connect to the Pech River Valley. At weekly meetings with Afghan elders, US troops make promises through an interpreter.

 

“Five years from now a road will go through here,” the American captain in combat gear, tells the old Afghan men, in their white beards and traditional dress.

 

“The road will make you guys more money, richer, more powerful,” the captain said. “I need you guys to join with government. We’ll flood this whole place with money, projects, with health care, with everything.”

 

Health care? Why not just promise them sugarplums, too? We can’t even universal health care in the United States. What would Speaker of the House John Boehner say about that?

 

If it sounded like devilish desperation to win hearts and minds to me sitting in Connecticut, the bargain must have sounded even more hollow to the assembled Afghan tribal elders, knowing about Bagram.

 

The U.S. captain, new to the Korengal, promises the elders he is different from his predecessor. “Everything that happened in the past with Captain McKnight is in the past, we’re wiping the slate clean, putting it behind us,” he said.

 

As if you can translate the idiomatic expression wiping the slate clean into Pashtun. The film lets the viewers know that the elders know about McKnight putting people into the black hole prisons at Bagram.

 

The elders also know about the lifeless bodies of their children and loved ones. The camera follows the platoon into a mountainous village to determine the effectiveness of a helicopter air strike.

 

The lead American soldier laments the death of five Afghan civilians. “I kill bad guys, but in the same instance, I kill five locals,” the American says. Sounds like a war crime to me. But he justifies the murder by noting that if they weren’t pulling the trigger, they must have been helping in some way.

 

If the insanity of war doesn’t become clear when the veterans who served in the Korengal lose their composure in post-combat interviews, it should when the white text on the black screen ends the movie by saying that the U.S. military pulled out of the Korengal in April 2010, after some 50 soldiers had died there.

 

And when their families remember those fallen men in years to come, hopefully, the passage of time will have blunted the sting of their death for such folly as an unwinnable war.