Recognize these guys? One of them is Evan Bayh, the Democratic [sic] senator from Indiana with a penchant for supporting Republican ideas and programs. 

 The other is Tom Salmon, our own Auditor of Accounts, who also seems to be establishing his public profile by supporting Republican ideas. Well, he's certainly got our attention. In January, Salmon stepped up with a proposal to change the character of Vermont's ski areas by alllowing casino gambling on the mountains, maybe to come up with a new meaning for the “Green Mountain State”.

Then, back in May, when the Democrats in the Legislature were standing up to Douglas's veto, Salmon tried to undermine them by offering to mediate between the two, presumably equally intransigent and guilty parties.We know how that came out: thanks to the organizational skill and intestinal fortitude displayed by Shap Smith and Floyd Nease, and the Democratic rank and file, the D's held the line and overrode Douglas's veto for the second time this session.

And then, just last week, we spotted him trying to insert himself into the legislative process and running an op-ed piece attacking the Democratic budget and parroting the Douglas line that Vermont can't afford to levy taxes to support social services.

And now this week, in another fight that really doesn't come within the purview of the Auditor of Accounts, Salmon sides with the Douglas administration on allowing ATV's on public land. 

 I don't know that much about ATV's, but I do know how happy I am when I've been away and I get back to our beautiful home state, and how much pleasure I and my family and friends have had in the woods, mountains, and trails across the state.I don't want to hear the ATV's in the woods when I'm out there, and I don't want to see stuff like this:

 Is there a guarantee that opening Vermont's public lands to ATV's will do this? Of course not, but I do think that it's going to be harder to regulate where ATV's go once they're on state land than to keep them out completely.

What does this have to do with Salmon? Just that we are now seeing one more time where Salmon is siding with the conservative, soft-on-the-environment Douglas, and against the people who want to protect the environment. He can do that if he wants, of course, and he may have his reasons to think that this will help his political career. On the other hand, if he keeps siding with the Republicans, will the Democrats be there when he comes looking for our support?

(melancholic yet cheerful alert, and a note: I am not a patient of Braun Dental)

The Barre/Montpelier Times Argus is reporting this morning that Braun Dental in Barre is closing its doors on Friday after a 20 year stint serving residents of the city and surrounding environs (Barre dental clinic unexpectedly closing, Times Argus, 07/08/09).

This will certainly be a hardship on the many folks who depended upon the clinic for their dental needs. That was a busy place.

But farther down …

Braun is referring patients with dental emergencies to Dr. Jim Culver, … Culver has agreed to see Braun’s patients, …

. . .

Starting Monday Dr. Bill Koch – another Barre dentist – has agreed to care for Braun’s records,…

(ibid)

This may not look like a big deal at first glance, but when I’ve talked with dentists I’ve been consistently told they are full up with existing patients and hesitant to overburden their offices by taking new ones on.

Not to mention taking on care of what is certainly a huge pile of dental records.

I’m sure there is some financial compensation for some of this. But at the same time I applaud the local dentists for doing what they can to assure the good (and bad) people of the Barre City area will still find accessible dental care.

It certainly is sad to see Braun Dental going out of business. I know people who relied on their quality service and reasonable rates. But it is also certainly heartening to see how local folks have rushed in to help pick up the pieces.

Community .. you know .. that 4th of July thing .. gotta love it!

If you're like me you don't have much use for “God Bless America”, and you're even more annoyed about the fact that you can't go to a ball game without being assaulted by it when you just want to hear “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” at the seventh-inning stretch.

Also like me, but unlike Bradford Campeau-Laurion, you've probably never been grabbed up by the police and hauled away because you had something better to do than sit there while the sheep watching the game with you sing.

There's now good news for Mr. Campeau-Laurion and for your civil liberties: with the help of the ACLU he sued the Yankees and the New York Police, and they've now settled for a cash payment to the plaintiff, attorneys' fees, and a statement from the Yanks that they won't force people to listen to the song if they don't feel like it. (Actually, the settlement says that the Yankees don't have any such policy and don't plan to institute such a policy, but you get the idea.)

So when you go to the game, and you're celebrating the greatest American game, and you hear a song that supposedly celebrates American values, you can be glad that you don't have to shed your civil liberties at the gate.

I don’t have time to do this up right, so I’m going to let the press release from the state employees’ union do the talking (emphasis added):

A Vermont State Employees Association (VSEA) public information request has provided the union with troubling information about the amount of federal money forfeited by the Douglas Administration as a result of its June position cuts.

“VSEA went over the list of 123 employees provided to us by the State, and we discovered that the total annual savings achieved by the State with its June position RIFs was approximately $6 million,” explained VSEA Director Jes Kraus. “However, of that $6 million saved, roughly $2.4 million was money the federal government provided to Vermont to help pay some of the RIF’d employees’ salaries. In fact, the feds were paying as much as 75 percent of some RIF’d employees’ salaries.

That’s right. In the biggest economic downturn in the better part of a century, Douglas is essentially sending millions of federal dollars back – all in order to put more Vermonters out of work (and all that, presumably, in the service of his ideological holy war against the union).

A response quickly followed into my inbox from one of the candidates to replace him. From the Racine campaign:

“I am disappointed that the Douglas Administration will forego $2.4 million that could have kept Vermonters working and provided much needed services to our citizens.

“Sending money back to Washington is a reverse stimulus package.  Rather than saving jobs and investing in our state’s economic recovery, cutting positions funded with federal money becomes a missed opportunity at a time when Vermonters need every opportunity they can get.

“During the legislative session, I questioned the Administration’s plan to cut positions that were funded entirely with federal money.  Eventually, some positions were restored because cutting them made no sense.  We face serious economic challenges and our response must be strategic and thoughtful.

“I again encourage the Governor to work with the Vermont State Employees Association to find the savings required by the Legislature.  I continue to believe that working together solutions can be found that keep Vermonters working and preserve Vermont’s ability to serve our communities.  Like the early retirement incentive, these solutions take collaboration and creativity.”

If I hear from any of the other candidates, I’ll post their responses as well.

On September 29, 1972, a passenger on the ferry to Martha's Vineyard recognized McNamara on board and attempted to throw him into the ocean. McNamara declined to press charges. The man remained anonymous, but was interviewed years later by author Paul Hendrickson, who quoted the attacker as saying, “I just wanted to confront (McNamara) on Vietnam.”

Sadly, the war criminal responsible for millions of civilian deaths and hundreds of thousands of military deaths, did not meet justice on that day. Rather, he died peacefully in his sleep this morning, a benefit that he denied to his victims. He did not perish in torment, his flesh consumed by the flames of napalm. He was not subjected to the Bell Telephone Hour like many of the prisoners of American forces, his testicles connected to a hand-cranked electrical generator. He did not spend months or years tortured as a POW.

No, McNamara lived to the comfortable age of 93. He had the opportunity to sell his memories for cheap absolution, while never truly acknowledging anything more than that mistakes were made. Mr. McNamara must not escape the lasting moral condemnation of his countrymen,” The New York Times said in a widely discussed editorial, written by the page’s editor at the time, Howell Raines. “Surely he must in every quiet and prosperous moment hear the ceaseless whispers of those poor boys in the infantry, dying in the tall grass, platoon by platoon, for no purpose. What he took from them cannot be repaid by prime-time apology and stale tears, three decades late.

McNamara was one of the so-called “Best and the Brightest” dissected by David Halberstam. Even the ultimate technocrat later admitted that before he helped launch the war of aggression against Vietnam he had no idea that the Vietnamese had been expelling invaders for a millenium. McNamara represented the arrogance embodied by that other ancient war criminal, Henry Kissinger: I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people.

In the end, of course, nothing McNamara, Kissinger, or any other American could do could mold Vietnam to fit American interests. There will be other days to wonder whether we will learn that same lesson in Iraq and Afghanistan. For now, we can join in Clarence Darrow's observation: I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.

The myth of Federal Benefits

It is sometimes claimed that, under the current US Federal Government, Vermont is a “beneficiary state,” that is, a state that receives more in benefits from the federal government than it pays in federal taxes.  According to data collected by the Tax Foundation, a private Washington organization that analyzes tax policies, Vermont receives $1.08 in federal expenditures for every dollar that Vermonters pay in federal taxes (based on data for the tax year 2005, a typical year before the current economic meltdown).

However, this number is misleading, because the feds inflict on us not only the ostensible yearly taxes, but also a huge hidden deficit.  The income taxes and other taxes we pay are not sufficient to cover expenditures, and each year the federal government runs a deficit, increasing the US national debt.  This debt is effectively an extra, deferred tax, which we owe and will have to pay in the future, with interest.

Your generous Uncle Sam, in other words, pretends to give you more money than you pay him in taxes.  But he is taking you for a sleigh ride.  He conveniently forgets to tell you that all this extra cash comes from IOUs on which he has put your signature.  He isn’t giving you his money, but merely your own – and, of course, he pockets some of it.

In its calculations, the Tax Foundation took Sam’s scam into account, but not to a full extent.  For Vermont, the actual raw number for the ratio of federal expenditures received to federal taxes paid is $4,645 million/$4,085 million, or $1.14 per $1.00.  The Tax Foundation revised this downward to $1.08 per $1.00 by making a correction for the cash deficit, which it treated as an extra hidden tax burden.  But the feds incur debts not only in cash received vs. cash expended, but also in “internal” transaction, such as misappropriations of funds from the Social Security and Medicare Trusts, which they divert to other purposes.  And they incur even larger debts by the accrual of new obligations to pay for future (as yet unfunded) Social Security, Medicare, and drug benefits.  

Rethinking the Scam Numbers

Instead of the minimalist deficit correction adopted by the Tax Foundation, it is more equitable to adopt a deficit correction according to the yearly increase of the gross federal debt reported by the US Treasury (see “Historical Debt Outstanding, Annual” www.treasurydirect.gov), which includes debt from internal transactions of the feds but excludes the long-term debt associated with new obligations for payments of future benefits.  In 2005, the increase of the gross federal debt was $554 billion.

The Vermont share of this debt was $1,170 million, if shares are allocated per capita.  (To put this in perspective, note that this comes to 1,870 for every man, woman and child.)  If we regard this deficit as an extra tax burden, the ratio of federal expenditures to total tax burden in Vermont drops to $0.88 per $1.00.

This shows that Vermont is not a beneficiary state.  Vermont is paying for its federal benefits through the nose, or, more precisely, Vermont will be paying through the nose once the IOUs that Uncle Sam has signed on our behalf become due, and the Japanese and Chinese who hold these IOUs ask for repayment, plus interest.

But wait, there’s more!

And that is not the whole story.  Many of the federal expenditures within Vermont are not made for the benefit of Vermonters, but merely for the benefit of the feds – many of these expenditures are not grants, but financial transactions involving payments for purchases of merchandise or for services rendered.

For instance, a bit more than 4% of the federal expenditures in Vermont are for the operation of the Post Office.  Evidently, postal services are a benefit for Vermont.  But we pay postage and fees for these services, and the feds’ expenditures are covered by these payments.  For a fair accounting, we must either include payments of postage and fees on one side of the balance sheet and the Post Office expenditures of the feds on the other side, or we must remove these items from both sides of the balance sheet.  In its analysis, the Tax Foundation did neither.  To fix this mistake, let’s subtract all the Post Office expenditures from the Tax Foundation’s balance sheet for Vermont.  When these expenditures are subtracted, the benefit of $0.88 per $1.00 is cut to $0.85.

Millions for “Defense”

Similar arguments apply to expenditures for military procurements in Vermont.  For example, if the feds pay, say, $100,000 to take possession of a Gatling gun manufactured by General Dynamics in Burlington, then the wealth of Vermont increases by $100,000.  But in the balance sheet, we must also include the fair-market value of this gun as a loss to Vermont.  If we reckon the fair-market value of the gun as $100,000, then this sale is a wash.  Thus, all such procurement payments are not grants, but compensation for merchandise and services rendered, and they should not be counted when comparing what we give to the feds versus what benefits Vermonters get in the “bargain.”

In fact, all defense payments – procurement, military salaries, civilian salaries, and National Guard grants – should be deleted from the balance sheet, because none are actually for the benefit of Vermont.  The feds expend defense funds in Vermont not to protect Vermont, but mainly for geopolitical reasons, to protect and expand the commercial and military empire of the United States – and this is of little concern to an independent Vermont Republic.  Defense payments (other than pensions and disability payments) are about 11% of federal expenditures in Vermont, and if we delete all this from the balance sheet, we discover that our benefits amount to only $0.75 per $1.00 of taxes raised.

Income tax in a Vermont Republic

For a calculation of the total income tax that Vermonters would have to pay as citizens of an independent Vermont Republic, let’s assume that we retain all programs and grants now being paid for by the feds with the exception of defense and a handful of minor programs of questionable value (e.g. No Child Left Behind grants, Improving Teacher grants, Homeland Security grants.)  Let’s also assume that expenditures on all existing Vermont state programs remain the same.  The total income tax to be paid in an independent Vermont Republic is then the existing Vermont state income tax, plus a surcharge that pays for the federal programs that we want to retain.

The starting point for the calculation is the total expenditures by the feds in Vermont: $4,645 million.  To see how much of this has to be funded by the income tax surcharge, simply subtract the portions that will be deleted in our Vermont Republic, and the portions that are funded by sources other than income taxes.  In millions, these subtractions are: $197 (postal service), $496 (defense), $33 (questionable federal programs), $1,894 (Social Security and Medicare, funded by payroll taxes).  Besides, the independent Vermont Republic will be collecting the excise taxes, estate taxes, and duties that now accrue to the feds, which effectively subtracts another $280 from the amount that must be raised from income taxes.  

Immediate Savings

The residual expenditure to be funded by a Vermont Republic income tax surcharge is then $1,745 million.  This is to be compared with the 2005 federal income tax burden of about $2,200 million placed on Vermont.  Thus, the citizens and corporations of the Vermont Republic would immediately save about $450 million in income taxes.  This amounts to about 16% of the combined 2005 income tax burden (combined federal and state, individual and corporate).

Furthermore, in the long term, we would save the full amount of the deficit burden that the feds, by hook and by crook, place on us.  For 2005, the feds’ deficit burden imposed on Vermont amounted to $1,170 million.  In contrast, the Vermont Republic would have no deficit; it would cover all expenditures out of the taxes it collects.  The combined total savings in tax and deficit burden amount to $1,620 million!

Lessons Learned

Even without independence, this tax analysis teaches a valuable lesson: the feds are giving Vermonters a bad deal.

And, with the ballooning deficits proposed for 2009, this deal is getting worse and worse.  With the bailouts and economic stimulus packages included, the projected deficit for 2009 is nearly $2 trillion (or more than $6,000 per capita).  The feds are taking far more from us than what they give back, and they are drowning us in a tidal wave of red ink and burdensome debt.  Besides, they inflict on us a muckload of irksome rules for spending what is, ultimately, our own money.

Borrowing a page from Benjamin Franklin’s playbook, Ethan Allen would have told the feds to go fly a kite and get struck by lightening.  

What’s our response?

This article was authored by Hans Ohanian and published in Vermont Commons: Mudseason 2009.  Dr. Ohanian is an adjunct Physics Professor at the University of Vermont and supporter of an independent Vermont Republic.  

The George W. Bush Foundation is now assembling trophies for his presidential library. They  may include on display the 9 millimeter Glock pistol given to Bush that was taken from Saddam Hussein by soldiers that captured him in his hide out.

A professor and historian at Rice University in Texas said (emphasis added) the pistol opened a psychological window into Mr. Bush’s view of his presidency…..You think ? The pistol in a glass case for five years was often shown to visitors in the Oval Office.

My gawd it really was all about George. Even out of office Bush can cause my jaw to drop in amazement at his horrid shallowness. No regrets from George, he has his little prize.

“That was a great day,” Mr. Bush told the Pentagon Channel in December. “I’ve had a lot of beautiful days in office; some not so happy. But my best days have come when certain milestones have been reached, and I love to share those milestones and those days with the people who actually made them happen.”

Mark Langdale, the president of the George W. Bush Foundation, said the library would use items to highlight 25 of Mr. Bush’s presidential decisions. “The gun is an interesting artifact, and it tells you that the United States captured Saddam Hussein and disarmed him literally,” Mr. Langdale said. “How we fit that into the decision to go to war, we haven’t gotten to that point yet.”

  – Army Times

Crossposted at Huffington Post.

“Mission compromised” may best describe U.S. military efforts in Afghanistan.  According to journalists Elizabeth Gould and Paul Fitzgerald, American foreign policy and military officials are making several costly miscalculations of Afghanistan’s politics, history, and culture.  In their new book, Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story, Gould and Fitzgerald demolish the myths, falsehoods, and assumptions that are being perpetuated since the 1980s.  

In 1981, Gould and Fitzgerald were the first US television crew granted visas to enter Afghanistan.  One year later, they produced the landmark PBS documentary, Afghanistan Between Three Worlds.  Gould and Fitzgerald continued to write about Afghanistan including a script with Oliver Stone and contributed to another book called, Women for Afghan Women: Shattering Myths and Claiming the Future.  Since the release of Invisible History,  Gould and Fitzgerald appeared on Democracy Now!, GRITtv, and C-SPAN Book TV.  

I caught up with Gould and Fitzgerald and discussed recent developments in Afghanistan.  Here’s what they had to say.  

Huffington Post; On Wednesday, president Barack Obama launched a major military operation in southern Afghanistan.  How will this affect the U.S.’s relationship with Pakistan?

Paul Fitzgerald: This has been foretold for some time that it was going to be happen.  We knew quite a while ago that 17,000 troops would be going into Helmand Province and fight the Taliban.  This has been one of the more curious aspects of the way in which the war was being fought.  When we were there in 2002, we were told by Time Magazine correspondent Rob Schultheis that the Inter-Services Intelligence was all over the place down there.  That was well-known in 2002 and the United States wasn’t doing anything about it.

Elizabeth Gould: What we’ve been observing over and over again is that the United States (and its goals and objectives) keeps coming up against a reality check that doesn’t add up.  One of the concerns that even though General Stanley McChrystal is making statements that Afghan civilians are his top priority, there are other issues which have been contentious and very difficult for the United States to really incorporate in a meaningful way.  What we’re dealing with is the follow-up, the actual ability to change the way in which we approach the region, which is still through a military lens and has already been designated as a failure.  One of the reasons it’s a concern is because it’s simply isn’t enough to change the military position.  Something like 400,000 troops would been needed to stabilize the country.  That’s one of the experiences we had in 2002.  When the Iraq War started, there was absolutely no question [in everyone’s mind] that the Taliban was going to return to Kabul.  That was a given and in the ensuing years, it built and built.  

Fitzgerald:  The original force structure was 1.6 soldiers per thousand residents. That was the combined force of the United States and NATO and like Elizabeth said, it would have required between 400,000 and 450,000 soldiers [to stabilize the country].  So it was inadequate from the very beginning.  What’s going on in Helmond is the Obama Administration is trying to establish some credibility for the first time.  The United States doesn’t have any credibility, militarily or civilly, in terms of backing up the civilian government.    

Would you say that the U.S. presence in Afghanistan is emboldening or strengthening the Taliban?

Gould: Well, first of all we have to define the Taliban.  We’re dealing with Pakistani Taliban and we’re dealing with Afghan Taliban.  The Pakistani Taliban is linked to the ISI, which is running the action arm of the Taliban.  The Pakistani Taliban is what we have to be concerned about.  It’s not that Afghan Taliban hasn’t utilized their tactics, but they’re not the engine of this process.  If we don’t deal with the Pakistani situation, we’re not going to solve Afghanistan situation.  The truth is that a majority of the Afghan Taliban could very well be non-ideological Afghans who are only in the Taliban because they do not have an economy at this point.  This could be the real motivation for many Afghanis [to join] the Taliban at this point.

Fitzgerald: What the United States has been doing since 2001 has essentially been empowering the Taliban.  These predator drone strikes have been an absolute disaster.  They have been using the predator drones in bombing raids because they did not have enough troops to begin with.  It was a cascading series of problems with one thing leading to the next and the next.  The more Afghan civilians they killed, the worse it became for the U.S.  The more you kill, the worse it gets for you to the point where the United States had very little support in the areas it was conducting predator drone strikes.  So the United States handed victory to the Taliban on a silver platter.

Then how can the United States win the hearts and minds of Afghanis?

Fitzgerald: Well, you really don’t have to look very far within Afghanistan itself to see the areas of Afghanistan where reconstruction efforts are working.  [In other areas where] where there is a lighter footprint, there are nations conducting reconstruction efforts or providing security to the Afghan people  where the Taliban has no influence.  In Herat, they’ve been able to rebuild the city. They’ve been able to rebuild the roads and they have consistent electricity.  They don’t have that in Kabul or other Pashtun areas because of the insurgency.  

Gould: But again, most of the insurgency is coming from Pakistan to keep things unstable. The Afghan Pashtuns are joining the Taliban primarily because of the economy.  

Fitzgerald:  I would say the central problem with what’s going on in Afghanistan right now has been the strange U.S. relationship with Pakistan.  That is at the core of it.  Former president Pervez Musharraf pretended to hunt the Taliban and Al Qaeda and the Bush Administration pretended to believe them.  It was like that old Soviet joke about “they pretended to work and the bureaucrats pretended to believe them.”

What are the questions the American media is not asking about the situation in Afghanistan? What should they be asking and investigating?

Fitzgerald: Well, the big issue is broad-brushing in terms of who the Taliban are.  The differences between the Afghani Taliban and the Pakistani Taliban is the Pakistani Taliban are really the ones behind the whole thing.  They take their orders and funding from Al Qaeda and they give the orders to the Afghan Taliban.  The other thing is there is no general understanding of what Afghanistan was prior to the Soviet invasion.  We keep coming against that all the time.  We keep coming up against ‘Well, the Afghans never had a society anyway, they were never civilized, they were always backward, and therefore you couldn’t reform them.’  It’s a logic train that was profoundly wrong from the very beginning.  

Gould:  Here’s a very current example of how the mindset really has been.  Jon Stewart, of The Daily Show, had an Afghan filmmaker on as one of his guests.  In the film, there was footage from the 1980s and it showed women in mini-skirts (or something like that) that totally shocked Stewart.  Stewart said ‘My God! I had no idea that place had anything modern.  I just assumed it was like in the dark ages.’  This is part of the propaganda campaign that really got going in the 1980s that pigeon-holed Afghanistan vis-a-vis the Freedom Fighters or the idea that the Taliban and their extreme interpretation of Sharia Law was somehow normal.  This was phony.  

Charles G. Cogan wrote in the fall 2008 World Policy Journal that the Taliban was a wholly-owned subsidiary Pakistani ISI and it was created with the intent of setting up a Pakistani-friendly government in Afghanistan.  When the Mujahideen were not able to take over Afghanistan from 1992 to 1996, the Taliban were sent in to do the job.  It may have had Afghans as a part of it, but this was a Pakistani-friendly government.  

Zbigniew Brzezinski, former president Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, was on Rachel Maddow talking about how the Taliban is indigenous to Afghans. Brezezinski should know full well that the actual creation of the Taliban is Pakistani intelligence.  People just sign on to it because they don’t know the difference between the Afghan Taliban, the Pakistani Taliban, and the real origins of these things.

In our book, we want to give a single source so that you can get the straight goods on what role the United States played and how various agencies interacted that resulted in this crisis for Afghanistan.  

For more information visit www.invisiblehistory.com or City Lights Books at www.citylights.com/publishing/

                        Elizabeth Gould and Paul Fitzgerald

One gets quite a picture of Vermont in this mix of participants at the Montpelier July 4th (well, 3rd) parade. Elected officials, bands, beauty queens, big puppets, tractors and rainbows galore – even a familiar GMD diarist.

6th Annual DemocracyFest coming soon!

July 17th-19th in Burlington, VT!

http://www.DemocracyFest.net

DemocracyFest is a political festival for liberal/progressive activists which features trainings, speakers and entertainment; teaching people how to make a difference and have fun doing it! The 6th Annual DemocracyFest will be held this summer, July 17-19, at the Sheraton Hotel and Conference Center in Burlington, VT!

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On-site hotel rooms at the Sheraton are available at the reduced rate of $99/night only until July 6th at 5pm EST! After that time, rooms will be available at the hotel’s prevailing rate of $197-$210 per night!

Reserve your lodging online by calling 1-802-865-6600 to make your reservation at only $99 per night, for rooms up to 3 days before or 3 days after the event (based on availability). You must say you are with the DemocracyFest group to get the reduced rate. Lodging at the reduced rate is limited, so make your reservation today!

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If you havn’t yet purchased your DemocracyFest event tickets, full event tickets are available for only $65! http://www.DemocracyFest.net

Full Event tickets include:

– All trainings, entertainment, and speakers on Saturday and Sunday.

– Dinner on Saturday with Sen. Mike Gravel.

– Breakfast on Sunday with Gov. Howard Dean.

– Semi-Guided Tour of Burlington and Welcome Party on Friday.

– Children under 14 free with adult ticket purchase.

– Free parking, or transportation to and from Burlington Airport.

– Priceless interaction with activists from across the nation.

Single day tickets are also available for $35.

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We also still have some tabling spaces left if your business or organization would like to sponsor DemocracyFest, please check out our very affordable sponsorship levels on our website. http://www.DemocracyFest.net

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See you soon!

David, Denise, Ellen, Jessica, Laurie and Quintus

The DemocracyFest Team

http://www.DemocracyFest.net