Connecticut
Post posts about what is happening in the State of Connecticut.
Discovering Something Important About Government
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 02/26/2009 - 08:27C.S. Lewis reportedly once said that he didn’t read the newspapers, claiming that if something important happened, someone would tell him. The recent news about bankruptcies, layoffs and proposed closings in the newspaper industry illustrates that perhaps he isn’t the only one with such an approach to the news.
Indeed, I first heard about the Journal Register’s bankruptcy filing via Twitter. I heard about the Hearst corporations threat to shut down the San Francisco Chronicle on NPR, and when Mark Pazniokas was let go from the Hartford Courant, I heard about it first via an Instant Message, with a message on Facebook following quickly after.
In my case, if I’m at my computer when I hear news like this, I start searching for various stories about it, typically starting at CT News Junkie and the New Haven Independent, and then supplementing my information with opinions from people at CT Local Politics and MyLeftNutmeg. All of this remains paperless.
This brings up an important question. Who determines what is important? What is newsworthy? Years ago, Walter Cronkite was our most trusted source of information and the New York Times gave us all the news that was fit to print.
Reporters find what they thought was important and try to get their editors to run the stories. People like Mark Pazniokas had in depth knowledge of what was going on at the Capitol and could pick out what was important and what was nothing new. Papers even had people trained in investigative reporting, that would spend countless hours digging deep into the hidden and underlying information of a story. Now, the last vestiges of these skills are being slept away.
At the same time, we have a new President in Washington who is vowing transparency. Yet as volumes of information about our government and our spending gets made public, who will sort through all of it to find something important?
One possibility is that we will return to a way of information gathering that existed before newspapers tried to appear objective, when they were the mouthpieces of partisan groups. When I think of the information I’ve received about Gov. Rell’s proposed budget, most of it has come from groups with very clear objectives. They don’t want to see funding for good education, clean energy or clean elections cut. Obama supporters in Connecticut are organizing a legislative watch group to do more of the same on a grassroots basis.
Besides the partisanship, these efforts run into a few different problems. There is the loss of skills and institutional memory that people like Mr. Pazniokas brought to the news room. Some of this can be addressed by creating easily searchable online repositories. Some of this can be addressed by training volunteers in better reporting.
Another issue is that of editorship. I’m less concerned about the proof reading aspects of editorship. It sometimes feels like I’ve got a thousand editors pointing out typos in my blog posts. No, the issue is, how do we decide which stories really are important. Some of this may be achievable by crowd sourcing. Articles that get a lot of attention, that get flagged as important by many readers, are perhaps the most important. Yet, as with the skills that the writers need, we need more skilled readers. We need better literacy education so that people can determine what really is important, as well as what is trustworthy, well written, and so on.
Then, there is the issue of distribution. The Hartford Courant has a circulation in the hundreds of thousands, but advocacy groups mailing lists are rarely more than a few thousand. Perhaps these few thousand are the influencers, the people that care and will act upon the information they receive. So, besides better training for activists, we need to help get people more involved. Yet newspapers have also been trying to boost circulation, without much effect, so the prospects in this area for activist groups remains questionable.
Where does this leave us? I’ll keep getting my news via Twitter and instant messages. I’ll keep reading good online sources of information, and I’ll keep encouraging others to join groups like Investigative Reporters and Editors and take courses at places like News University.
If we all do this, then maybe we will stand a chance to discover something important about our government.
Change, and the Land of Steady Habits
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 02/22/2009 - 16:01Connecticut is known as the land of steady habits, a place where change comes slowly. So, how do we bring about change in the land of steady habits? What roles do our budgets, stimulus plans and deficit mitigation plans play in helping bring about change or thwart change? In a state with one of the largest gaps in school achievement between black and white and rich and poor and one of the largest income gaps between rich and poor, what is addressing our problems and what is making our problems get worse?
Too often, it seems, people are looking at the most immediate aspects. They claim that we have too many people working for the state, that we are paying them too high a salary, or that we are not delivering services as efficiently and effectively as possible. Perhaps we would be better off if we looked at ways to address the underlying problems.
Some people look at the disintegration of the family and point to that as an underlying problem. Yet they don’t go further and look at what can be done to make the family stronger and get family members more involved in our schools, towns and our state.
Let me suggest that the first part of the problem to address is the view that the problem is intractable. If you don’t believe you can change the system, then you probably won’t try and we end up with a cycle that just gets worse. Yet the Obama campaign, with its mantra, “Yes, We Can!” is perhaps the most important first step. People have started to believe that they can make a difference. We need to find ways of spreading this belief as an important first step.
Yes, you can make a difference. Start off by finding out who your State Representative is. Contact them. Tell them about what your concerns are. After all, they have been elected and are getting paid to represent you. If you don’t talk with them about what you think matters, they aren’t going to do as good a job as they can.
If you’ve got some time, go through the bills that they are currently considering. Tell them what you think about the bills. An easy way to do this is to look at the legislative committees and the bills that these committees are considering. I’ve written about bills the Government Administrations and Elections Committee are considering as well as bills the education committee are considering. Go out and form your own opinions.
On a local level, go to town meetings. Get involved in your local school system. I’ve often talked about the biggest effect on the success of a school system is the involvement of parents.
Yet this gets me to how our system is designed to fail. Parental involvement in schools is crucial. Citizen involvement in our government is crucial. My wife and I can juggle our schedules to drive to a school meeting or a town meeting. Yet in areas where the schools are under performing, many parents just can’t make it to meetings. If they have the flexibility to juggle their schedules, they may not have the means to get to meetings.
How many school meetings, whether they are board of education meetings or parent teacher meetings are arranged in a way that people who rely on public transportation can easily get to and from the meeting? If you want to improve our schools and our local governments, perhaps a good starting point is to improve public transportation and arrange the schedule of meetings to fit well with public transportation schedules. Lacking that, citizens should find ways to help one another to get to meetings. Perhaps we need citizen action car pools.
Yes, we are a land of steady habits, and some of these are bad habits that need to be broken. One of those bad habits is not looking at structural impediments to what could make our schools, our communities, and our state better off. What are the impediments that are preventing you or people you know from participating more fully in our schools, towns and state? What are you doing to address these impediments?
A starting point can be to start talking about them.
Organizing For Connecticut
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 02/21/2009 - 17:15What will happen to all the people that got energized by the Obama campaign last year? Will they fade back into the woodwork, or will they continue to believe, and act upon that belief, in their own ability to bring about change? As we watch the finagling around stimulus packages, deficit mitigation packages, and proposed budgets, it is easy to imagine that politics as usual has won. However, if the meeting at the Yale Afro-American Cultural Center this morning is any indication, it may be premature to write-off the influence of the newly invigorated.
Of the couple dozen people that showed up to hear a little bit about the shape Organizing for Connecticut is beginning to take, there was a good mix of newly involved and more experienced activists. Heidi Green of 1000 Friends of Connecticut was there. Laurie Santos of the Shoreline League of Democratic Women was there. There were people from Democracy for America there as well as people from various unions.
People there had differing opinions. Some were more concerned about healthcare. Others were more concerned about building a green economy. Some felt that Gov. Rell’s budget proposals reflected a small government philosophy following the example of Grover Norquist. Others felt that she was actively trying to widen the state’s income gap, one of the few areas where Connecticut is outperforming other states. Although it does seem like the small government philosophy of Grover Norquist et al is focused on widening the economic disparity.
Many of the participants will take place in an activist training in early March and everyone seemed energized about acting on their own ability to bring about change, and learning new ways to be more effective at it. How effective will all these new activists be? Some people may have to wait and see. Others may want to get involved now and be part of the solution.
Abdul-mumin and Irv
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 02/16/2009 - 20:38It has been an emotionally draining day. Friends are off skiing or swimming for February vacation while I’m putting in long hours on a programming project. I continue to read about the ups and downs of a friend who has recently been diagnosed with Leukemia. Then, yesterday, I learned that Irv Stolberg died last Friday. He had been fighting Leukemia for a year. Today, I learned of another activist that died unexpectedly.
I’ve tried to find words to write about Irv. Many people have written many words already, and somehow, I don’t imagine Irv would be looking for more flowery words. He would be looking for action. He would be telling not to mourn, but to organize. In my mind, I hear the strains of “Joe Hill” rising up in the background.
As I sat at my computer, I received an instant message from ‘Kaabarah’. Kaabarah’s name is Abdul-mumin and I’m not sure how he ever found me. He started sending me messages back in 2005. I didn’t know who he was and we didn’t end up talking much back then. Today, me IMed me again. He mentioned that he was working on a project on advocacy for youth development in Tamale as part of Global Youth Service Day. I did a quick search on Tamale and found that it is the capital of the northern region of Ghana.
Abdul-mumin spoke about the project he did last year and suggested that I search on his name. I found his Flickr Stream which included pictures from last year’s Global Youth Service Day project at the Dakpemah primary school. We chatted for a little bit, and he came to the ask. Did I know of any environmental organizations that could be partners to his organization?
Ghana is just two countries over from Nigeria, and a request for help from an unknown person in a country near Nigeria normally raises red flags for most Americans. Yet I had done some searching. I saw Abdul-mumin on many NGO related sites, TakingITGlobal, the AIDS 2006 Youth Site and the Civicus 8th World Assembly.
He talked about the Youth and Poverty Reduction Strategy e-Course which he was currently taking and his hopes for a special youth fellowship from UNFPA/UNAIDS.
Irv had been president of the Connecticut Division of the United Nations Association. He had often traveled to other countries to help promote democracy. If there is a fitting eulogy for Irv, perhaps it is a call to action to reach out to people like Abdul-mumin to help them achieve their dreams.
What is the best way to help out a young man from Ghana who is working hard to make his country and his world a better place? I don’t know, yet. But perhaps the way I can best honor Irv is to try and find out how to help Abdul-mumin.
Can We Afford Democracy?
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 02/15/2009 - 11:39Find the cost of freedom, buried in the ground
Underlying the debate about deficit mitigation, budgets and stimulus packages is the question, what do we value. One concern is that we all want to be free to spend our hard earned money the way we want, and not the way some bureaucrat in Hartford or Washington wants it spent. America has always valued its freedom. We spend billions of dollars on our military and honor those who have died defending our freedoms.
Yet just as essential to our defense of freedom is our need to be able to find out what people are doing in our government and our ability to hold our elected officials accountable. Sometimes, this comes when one part of our government calls another part of our government to task, the way State Representative Andrew Fleischmann did at the Yale Education Leadership Conference pointing out that some of Governor Rell’s budget proposals are simply budget cuts masquerading reforms.
What is of more concern is bad reforms masquerading as budget cuts, and Governor Rell’s budget proposal is full of these. In today’s Journal Inquirer Chris Powell’s column, Can Connecticut afford to know about government? calls out some of these bad reforms. He asks, ”How much is actual public notice of government operations worth?” Those of us who believe that our freedom is based, in part, on being able to hold our government officials accountable, believe that it is worth a lot.
Back in January, I wrote a blog post about bills before the Government Administrations and Elections committee. I noted bill 5214 which called for allowing municipalities to post notices on their websites in lieu of buying notices in local newspapers. As an Internet sort of person, I’m perhaps less concerned about this than the managing editor of a local newspaper would be.
Yet Mr. Powell raises very important concerns. Newspapers get much wider circulation, and people not looking for municipal notices are likely to stumble across the notices anyway. In addition, newspapers are an important persistent record. For all the permanence of Internet pages it is still way too difficult to find archived material from too many municipal websites.
In addition, as I spoke about in my blog post and as Mr. Powell commented in his column,
Further, many town officials are seeking repeal of a recent state law requiring towns that have Internet sites to post there the minutes of their public agency meetings. Such regular updating of town Internet sites, these officials say, is too complicated and expensive.
This is where one bad reform is masquerading as budget cuts. The common theme between both of these is less notice and accountability because budget constraints. Yet in these times of fiscal crisis, we need exactly the opposite. We need more notice and more accountability of our elected officials.
This leads me to another bad reform masquerading as a budget cut. The most powerful way to hold our elected officials accountable is at the ballot box. The Citizens Election Program is an important way to encourage increased competition for elected office. Yet Governor Rell’s budget proposal plays a shell game with funding for this program as well as for election enforcement and gravely damages our ability to have competitive elections.
Mr. Powell asked, “Can Connecticut afford to know about government?” I would expand that and ask not only if we can afford to know about government, but if we can afford to do anything when our government fails us. Perhaps more importantly we need to ask if we can afford not to know what our government is up to and how to respond.
