Tuesday’s election might not have been a presidential year, but both New London and the country made some interesting decisions. Here in New London, we elected Daryl Finizio for mayor in this city’s first election since the switch from the previous city manager style. Over in Ohio, voters resoundingly rejected a law that would have limited the bargaining rights of unions. The Tea Party and other conservative groups may have won most of the major battles last year, but this year shows a much more nuanced electorate that may not be quite as favorable to the Republicans as Fox News would have you think.
Daryl Finizio’s victory was the ending of a surprisingly bitter and divisive mayoral race. This year was the first year that New London was actually electing a mayor with any real authority. In years past, the city has operated a city council and an outside city manager hired by the council. There was a mayor, but it was a mostly ceremonial position, again appointed by the council. The historic nature of the election gave the race a charged atmosphere to begin with, but it only got stranger from there. After losing the Democratic Town Council’s nomination to Mike Buscetto by a count of 52 to 6, Finizio forced a primary. Finizio won that primary, and with it the Democratic nomination for mayor. Buscetto did not concede, though, and mounted a write-in campaign. All in all, six candidates ran, and participated in several heated debates.
One of the important planks of all the candidates’ platforms was an attempt to make a vision for New London that will make the city vibrant once again. New London has seen a decades-long decline, and it is imperative that the city faces its problems now instead of down the line. In the end, Finizio simply had a better vision for the city, and the voters agreed. Unique among the candidates, he wants to hire a city lobbyist and a grant writer. These positions would cost money in salary and benefits, but an effective lobbying operation in Hartford and more successful grant writing could win the city millions of dollars, when the positions would cost a fraction of that. He was against the sale of Riverside Park to the Coast Guard Academy, which was controversial among residents. Some wanted to sell the park to get cash to help fund other projects. But Finizio rightly stood his ground. New London can never be a city that people want to live in if it doesn’t have parks and open spaces for people to congregate and events to be held. Simply put, the city needs places to do things, and Riverside Park is a great asset for the future. Finizio was the best choice to lead this city to a brighter future, and I congratulate the voters on their wisdom.
Looking nationally, the voters in Ohio made an excellent decision when they rejected Republican Gov. John Kasich’s anti-union bill. The bill had been formulated to severely curtail the bargaining rights of public unions. It was an attack on teachers, police officers, and firefighters. In a recessed economy, it strikes me as both illogical and immoral to deny struggling public servants the right to fairly bargain for the future of their families. Teachers, police officers, and fire fighters did not cause this recession. They didn’t give out dangerous no income, no asset loans to struggling homeowners already bogged down by mounting debt, or mislead the American public into believing the housing bubble would continue. Kasich defended his law by saying states and cities needed more flexibility to negotiate on contracts to save money. Ohioans realized the flaw in his logic, though; punishing the middle class might make conservatives in ivory towers happy, but it doesn’t change the fundamental issues that have plagued our economy for years. The attack on public servants is a desperate measure by a conservative movement becoming increasingly isolated from the mainstream; it is a poor solution aimed at a problem that doesn’t exist. Because of the ideological rigidity of Kasich and his ilk, they don’t actually have a whole lot of policy tools to fix anything in the economy. Any revenue increases are off the table, so all they are left with is slashing spending. You can’t just cut your way to a balanced budget, no matter how hard Grover Norquist prays at night.
This referendum doesn’t seem to fit the narrative that Fox News and its stooges have been carefully crafting for years. They have told us that people are angry at bloated government spending, that the unfettered free market will be our one and only savior, and that corporate greed isn’t the problem. In fact, greed is good! But in Ohio, that narrative got flipped on its head. People don’t like to see government waste, that’s true. But they don’t want to see those budgets go down at the expense of family members and neighbors while the elite class of businessmen and politicians escapes unscathed with huge bonuses and obscene severance packages intact. Conservatives aren’t really protecting the “free market,” because any market that is actually free has common-sense regulations to protect consumers and competitors. Allowing bloated corporations to essentially run the economy is a sure recipe for disaster. As this country goes down, the corporations will simply move away. Don’t fool yourself into thinking that these executives hold America’s interests paramount. Profits are the name of the game, and as long as corporations can get them, then all other repercussions are secondary and relatively meaningless. That might make sense from a business perspective, but if corporations want to be treated as people, they might as well act as if they had a conscience.
