By Jason Cunningham
We hear the buzz that elections are coming from just about everywhere. It barrels over my generation. We see the familiar smiles of candidates, their parties are color coded and engrained into our minds. The reds and blues flash across our television screens. The street teams hold signs and scream at passing cars. Opinions are peppered throughout newspapers for those who are still picking them up. The stories of scandal, experience and worthiness fill blogs and news websites.
Of course our professors’ pleas for us to register and go out and vote are lingering on the back burner in the rush to get to the next class, the next nap, the next shift or the next party depending on the student. As a small part of this swarm that races towards the month of November, I felt obligated to say one thing to the Recorder’s readers: whatever you do, please don’t vote for Tom Foley for governor. I’m not making any endorsements here, I’m just pleading with you not to let Foley have any say in Connecticut’s future.
Foley wants to find ways to healthily increase revenue in our state and he plans to balance the budget next year without raising taxes. Apparently he has the magical ability to to conjure up jobs and make a $3.4 billion deficit disappear. The opposite seemed to be true when Foley managed the Bibb Company textile mill in Georgia. It’s been accused by many that Foley cut jobs, pocketed millions during his time there and caused the Bibb Company’s eventual bankruptcy. Foley denies these claims even though he was pushed out of the company right before it was forced to go bankrupt for his poor leadership abilities. Can we trust a guy like Foley to run Connecticut competently?
Foley has lied about the compensation for state employees equaling or surpassing that of private sector employees to a mostly unaware public. The Economic Policy Institute showed that full-time employees are under compensated by 3.7% when compared to the private-sector. Every Connecticut citizen depends on public employees, college students especially. Foley wants to shrink government spending and that’s a hit that Connecticut’s public institutions cannot take. Foley’s campaign website states that:
“We have an obligation to provide an excellent education to all of our young people. We can and must do better. Our economy and the future of our state depend on it.”
How is pledging to reduce the cost of state government spending by at least $1 billion during his first year as governor going to help? Will any of that be coming out of the governor’s salary? Claiming that the state has been spending tax dollars at a reckless rate and accepting a salary as governor when you’re filthy rich like Foley is purely irresponsible. Foley has claimed that if elected he will reform education in Connecticut without digging deep into tax payers’ pockets. I have to believe that Foley has no real feasible plans for education in the works.
He proposes complex changes without understanding them. Connecting a portion of teachers’ pay to their students’ standardized test scores, as Foley has proposed, will anger a lot of teacher unions’ members. Rewarding schools that succeed in getting higher scores is no easy task either. Schools that are struggling, mainly in inner cities, will not get the help they need to improve students’ standardized test scores with Foley’s plan. While it’s good that he supports choices for students’ education, options for charter schools come to mind, it seems like he’s already given up on schools that are not performing up to par. His only mention of public colleges and universities was that we could make them more efficient, a vague offering at best. Can we trust a guy like Foley to improve education in Connecticut when his plans are loose at best and will have little funding?
Foley was the Director of Private Sector Development for the Coalition Provisional Authority, which called the shots in Iraq from April 2003 until June 2004 during the United States occupation. The CPA screwed up big time during their reign, wasting billions of dollars corruptly, a lot of which ended up in the pockets of insurgents. Foley oversaw nearly all of Iraq’s 192 state-owned enterprises. He received a Department of Defense Distinguished Public Service Award in June 2004 for his participation in the chaotic circus that was the CPA. Foley is featured in Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s book Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone:
A month after arriving, Foley told a contractor from Bearing Point [a GOP- connected criminal consulting firm] that he intended to privatize all of Iraq’s state-owned enterprises within thirty days.
“Tom, there are a couple of problems with that,” the contractor said. “The first is an international law that prevents the sale of assets by an occupation government.”
“I don’t care about any of that stuff,” Foley told the contractor, according to her recollection of the conversation. “I don’t give a shit about international law. I made a commitment to the president that I’d privatize Iraq’s businesses.”
While the book’s depiction of Foley has been disregarded by the candidate as hearsay, it doesn’t change that the privatizing of these businesses would’ve meant that the United States could have bought all of the state-owned companies in Iraq, giving the U.S. a huge payoff off of the back of another country illegally. He thankfully failed. Can we trust a guy like Foley to run Connecticut without corruption when his past is so murky with controversy?
Many college graduates are leaving the state because of the difficult job market and many trade jobs have slowed down or stopped existing in Connecticut altogether. We can’t risk our state’s future on someone who can’t be trusted to lead intelligently or with integrity. Foley has not dealt with his past honestly and most likely will apply the same ethics to Connecticut’s future if elected Governor. His leadership doesn’t deserve your consideration. Foley’s motto has been that Hartford is broke and broken. It’s better to be broke and broken than rich and unfixable. If we can’t trust him now, we can’t trust him to change later.