{news} CT's Fournier- NBHerald- Fighting for the "damaged and discouraged"

[Tim McKee]

New Britian Herald
08/17/2008
Green Party candidate wants to fight for 'damaged and discouraged'
By STEVE COLLINS , Journal Register News Service

BRISTOL - Green Party congressional hopeful Steve Fournier, of Hartford,
offers a strikingly different agenda than those put forward by major
party candidates.

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"I think our country is in the toilet and I'm willing to go in there and
pull it out," Fournier said. "Cleaning up Congress is a dirty job ... and
somebody has to do it."

Fournier, 62, said that volunteers have collected more than 3,000
signatures in the 1st District that "make it all but certain" that he'll
be on the November ballot against U.S. Rep. John Larson, an East Hartford
Democrat, and Republican challenger Joe Visconti, of West Hartford.

To reach the ballot, a petitioning candidate needs 2,050 verified
signatures from registered voters, a determination that should be made
soon.

Fournier's campaign aims "to vindicate us with our grandchildren. They
will certainly defile our graves if we don't make big changes now."

Fournier, a community activist, said he personally got 900 signatures -
and talked with those who signed.

"The people I've been talking to are angry, but they're also afraid.
Afraid to dissent and afraid to look powerless and foolish," he said.

Fournier said that people are looking away from what the nation's leaders
have done to the country during the past generation.

"The criminals who govern us have injured our earth, damaged our
republic, put us in mortal danger and we go on as if everything were
fine, seemingly unaware of our dire situation," Fournier said in a
pamphlet.

"My conversations tell me that we are not unaware and that we are
seething with repressed rage. Witnesses to an atrocity, we turn away
because we feel unable to act," he said.

"We're told that enemies are in our midst," Fournier said, "and our
biggest fear is not that any of the million or so terrorists out there
will do us any harm but that we will be counted among them."

"And so we take off our shoes in the airport and buy newspapers that lie
to us and pretend to support the troops and stay away from political
gatherings of all kinds," he said.

"It's not that people are apathetic or complacent. We're damaged and
discouraged," Fournier said.

Fournier, a Vietnam veteran, said that "racketeers and their henchmen now
govern America."

"The two major political parties have been complicit in the racket and
have furthered it by trashing the Bill of Rights, undermining the rule of
law and effectively repealing all checks on executive power," he said.

"Most recently, our leaders have waged two wars to advance their
political ends and lost both of them, as all responsible authorities
predicted they would," Fournier said.

"They have long since quit regulating the big, anti-national corporations
that control public policy, resulting in the widespread abuse of workers,
poor quality goods, mass export of jobs, declines in public health and
happiness, environmental pollution, the concentration of wealth in a few
hands and a failing economy," he said.

"These problems can't be addressed until Americans undertake the
restoration of Constitutional government," Fournier said. "This candidacy
- the candidate is a troublemaker and whistleblower - is an expression of
urgency."

Fournier said he's been active in politics since he left the Air Force in
1970 and got involved in the anti-war movement and left-wing politics. In
the years since, he said, he's been a Democrat, a Republican and a Green
Party member.

With the exception of a brief stint on the Hartford Board of Education a
decade ago when he helped convince the state to take over Hartford's
troubled public schools, Fournier's been an activist and outsider.

Larson has rolled over challengers since winning the 1st District in
1998.


©The Herald 2008

******************************************
Tim McKee, Manchester CT, main number cell-860-778-1304, 860-643-2282
 National Commitee member of the Green Party of the United States and is a spokesperson for the Green Party of CT.
BLOG-http://thebiggreenpicture.blogspot.com

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