I don't know about you, but I'd have to say it's Cory Booker's body man.

Look at the last few months.

In April, Booker ran into a burning house and rescued a woman trapped inside. 

 Last week Booker rescued a freezing dog and yelled at the owner for leaving the dog out in the cold.

If I were working for the mayor I would be hoping he doesn't spot a beached whale: how far out to the ocean do you think he'd swim towing a whale? 

Several environmental organizations will hold a news conference Tuesday morning to announce legal action to ensure that Vermont has a say over any plan to move tar sands oil through the state.

I provided a lengthy background in a June 2012 post about tar sands oil, but here’s a shortened version: There’s an existing oil pipeline that runs from Portland, Maine to Montreal, by way of the Northeast Kingdom. Currently, it carries imported oil to Canadian markets. A few years ago, the Canadian pipeline operator Enbridge developed a plan to reverse the flow so the pipeline could carry tar-sands oil from Alberta to Portland for export. That plan was shelved, but there are signs it’s being revived.

Enbridge has gained approval from the Canadian government to reverse the pipeline from Sarnia, Ontario to Montreal. That could simply be a move to carry western oil to eastern Canadian markets; but it’d be awfully tempting to make the oil available for export, and Portland is by far the closest option.

The issue at the core of this lawsuit: since it’s an existing pipeline, would the operator be able to simply adjust its existing Act 250 permit, or would it need to start from scratch and seek a new one? If the former, the state and Vermonters would have little say.

The environmental groups plan to seek court action to ensure that the reversal would require a fresh Act 250 process.

On a separate track, State Rep. David Deen has introduced a bill that would mandate Act 250 review for any change in use for existing oil pipelines.

Tar sands oil is truly nasty stuff; it’s sludgy and corrosive, and a 2010 pipeline break in western Michigan caused a major amount of damage, which is still being cleaned up. (Details in that same June post.)

The groups holding tomorrow’s presser include the Conservation Law Foundation, VPIRG, 350.org, and the National Wildlife Federation.  

As if I needed to tell you, it’s the Special Memeface Edition of “Thumbs Up, Thumbs Down…”

Two milestones on the road to recovery from Tropical Storm Irene. On Saturday, there were public celebrations in Duxbury and Bartonsville. The former marked the closure of Rebuild Waterbury, an Irene recovery effort for Waterbury and surrounding communities.

And in Bartonsville, a new wooden covered bridge was dedicated. It replaces the old Bartonsville bridge, which was swept away in post-Irene floods. The ribbon-cutters included the usual suspects, Gov. Shumlin and U.S. Rep. Peter Welch; but the brightest face belonged to Sue Hammond, the Bartonsville native who caught the bridge’s collapse on video, complete with her unfiltered cries of dismay. She recounted for WCAX her childhood memories of crossing the bridge and swimming in the river below. Its reopening is a positive sign for all Vermont, but it’s most welcome for the people who live in and around Bartonsville.

Devoted environmentalist Skip “Gasoline” Vallee, for continuing to fight the self-interested fight against a proposed Costco gas station off I-89 Exit 16. Last week, the Costco plan won a land-use permit under Act 250 — and Vallee immediately promised to appeal the ruling.

Not that we would ever question the environmental bona fides of a guy who made his bones selling fossil fuel… but let’s be real: the only reason he’s fighting Costco is that it would provid stiff competition for his Exit 16 Maplefields station, and threaten Burlington-area profit margins that are among the highest in the nation. It seems certain that Skippy will spend plenty of those profits on lawyers, as he takes his battle to every possible tribunal in an effort to delay the inevitable as long as possible.

After the jump: One fond farewell, one good riddance, and Jim Doesless saysless.

Avram Patt, General Manager of my electricity provider, Washington Electric Co-op, who just announced he will retire at the end of June after 16-plus years on the job. The Co-op has been a pioneer in renewable power generation, and they go out of their way to help their customers. At least I think so.

But there’s a lot more to Mr. Patt than a career spent in utilities and public service. In his younger days, he spent two years performing with the Bread and Puppet Theater, and he’s the singer/storyteller/drummer of the Nisht Geferlach Klezmer Band. And hey, a touch of Yiddish is just what Vermont culture needs.

 Wayne Leonard, CEO of Entergy Corporation (owner of Vermont Yankee), on the occasion of his much more welcome departure. Leonard is retiring at the end of this month after 14 years at the top of Entergy. If you read the New Orleans Times Picayune, you learn that Leonard helmed the company through some very tough times to a much more prosperous present.

Guess the Times Picayune hasn’t heard about that grim UBS Securities forecast on Entergy’s cash-flow troubles.

But here’s the best part:

Leonard… has developed a reputation as a chief executive with a conscience, who’s relied on a range of personality traits to motivate others and promote his vision of a better society.

Oh yeah. This is the same guy who let Yankee’s decommissioning fund dwindle, who’s failed to bolster Yankee’s poor reputation in these parts, who tried to pull off a financial shell game by spinning off Yankee (and Entergy’s other nukes) into a new corporation with no assets, who continues to fight tooth and nail against Vermont’s efforts to enforce the terms of its operating license, and who’s stoutly defended Yankee throughout its myriad technical and maintenance troubles. “Chief executive with a conscience,” my Aunt Fanny.

The Brookfield floating bridge, which is finally on the road to reopening. The unique bridge carried Route 65 traffic — and many a curious tourist — across Sunset Lake for decades has been closed to vehicles and pedestrians since 2008 due to a loss of buoyancy.

Last week, an Agency of Transportation official told Brookfield residents that the bridge was on the AOT’s budget for 2014. If all goes well, construction would begin in the spring of 2014 with a projected opening in the fall of that year. The new bridge should have a life expectancy of 100 years. The feds will cover 80% of the estimated $4.7 million cost of the new bridge, with the state picking up the remainder.

Noted socks and underwear connoisseur Peter Shumlin, for staging a photo-op today at the Northfield mill that produces Darn Tough Socks less than two weeks after he trumpeted a proposed new Walmart in Derby.

Why does he get dinged for two random promotional events, you may ask?

Well, on the one hand, Shumlin seeks to highlight local manufacturing; on the other, he talked of Newport-area residents’ need for a place to buy socks and underwear — at a mega-chain retailer that doesn’t carry Darn Tough Socks. Oopsie.

Governor-turned-pundit Jim Douglas, for a series of VPR commentaries that are either dreadfully shallow and bland, or completely self-serving.

Last week, I wrote a post about Douglas’ latest VPR emission — an ego-driven bleat about how Gov. Shumlin stole all his education-reform ideas. And how the cretins in the Democratic Legislature torpedoed all those ideas back in the day. In response to my post, frequent commenter “terje” noted that all of Douglas’ VPR commentaries are pretty much like that.

So I checked, and terje is right — sort of.

Douglas’ commentaries basically fall into three (equally useless) categories:

— The grumbling-in-his-drink stuff, wherein he explains how he would have solved all our problems if only the shortsighted Democrats hadn’t stymied him.

— The shallow and uninteresting recitations of historical and political trivia.

— Complaints about the divisive partisanship of today’s politics. He usually leaves unspoken the obvious undercurrent: “It’s not like things used to be when I was in office.” The problem is that Douglas was the one who first imported the corrosive carpet-bombing political playbook of the Karl Rove types.

Remember a guy named Jim Barnett, last seen driving Scott Brown’s campaign off the cliff? (Barnett ran a harshly negative campaign against Elizabeth Warren, in spite of the fact that his candidate’s only real asset was likability.) Well, Jim cut his political teeth in the mid-Aughties as Jim Douglas’ pit bull. Or, as Peter Freyne called him, “Mad Dog.”  

Here’s another Freyne nickname: the Nasty Boys, given to Barnett and Neale Lunderville for their relentlessly negative approach to partisan politics. They did the dirty work, while Douglas enjoyed plausible deniability as he pretended to be a nice-guy conciliator.

And now he’s mounted his high horse to condemn all the angry partisanship he sees around him.

To sum it all up, there’s a bit more variety to Douglas’ VPR commentaries than terje said. But terje’s underlying point is certainly true: they’re a waste of perfectly good airtime.  

Originally published on Counterpunch and Towards Freedom

Vermont, the most progressive state in America, spent over $14 million last year to lock up Vermonters in for profit prison like Lee Adjustment Center, located in Kentucky’s Daniel Boone National Forest. Private prisons like Correctional Corporation of America (CCA)’s Lee Adjustment Center offer no mental health, educational or rehabilitational services, but they do post massive corporate profits; CCA posted $1.7 billion in 2011 revenue alone. As best-selling author Michelle Alexander notes in her seminal book The New Jim Crow, more black men are under correctional control now than were enslaved in 1850. A recent New Yorker piece noted more Americans are now incarcerated than there were imprisoned in Stalin’s gulags. Clearly a dialogue about mass incarceration, budget crises, and privatization is unfolding. A group of Vermonters working out of Church basements and living rooms is attempting to build a movement to push this conversation forward by passing a historic law banning Vermont’s use of for-profit prisons.

Behind the Profitable Private Prison Wall

Between 2002 and 2003, according to the Rutland Herald, the number of prisoners in Vermont increased at “nearly five times the national average.” The number of teenagers and young adults in Vermont jails surged by more than 77 percent. A racialized “get tough on crime” ideology, mandatory minimums, and harsher sentencing guidelines from the failed war on drugs left then Republican Vermont Governor Jim Douglas at a moment of departure: build new prisons, or start shipping Vermonters incarcerated under these controversial policies into the deep south to be warehoused without even the “rehabilitative” programs found in Vermont prisons.

According to Prison Legal News’ Matthew Clarke, CCA doubled the population of Lee Adjustment Center in three months in 2004 with a massive influx of some of the first Vermont prisoners housed in private prisons. These conditions and what State Senator James Leddy called a “rogue warden” led to an uprising at Lee Adjustment Center involving 100 inmates. The Louisville Currier Journal and The Times Argus detailed how those involved in the riot tore down fences, began “tearing apart” a wooden guard tower with a guard still inside and toppled the guard tower. In addition, fires “heavily damaged the administration building and guard shack.”

“The inmates literally had control of this place, the inner compound,” said Adam Corliss, an inmate from Springfield, Vermont. A week and a half after the riot, the Montpelier Vermont daily The Times Argus printed an excerpt of a Vermont inmate’s letter home to his fiancé detailing the uprising: “Inmates chasing guards with 2x4s breaking everything in sight…It was so hostile that the S.W.A.T. team of guards came in, launching tear gas, armed with shotguns.”

When the Assistant Warden summoned the 20-person response team only three responded. Clarke details the precipitating conditions: racial and regional prejudices, overcrowding, poor nutrition, and CCA’s warden undertaking, “a zero-tolerance disciplinary crackdown that gave guards the ability to discipline prisoners without proof of misconduct and even put them in solitary confinement for 60 days without disciplinary charges.”

These conditions and the riot they produced happened in the first months of Vermont’s experiment with private prisons. Rather than serving as a cautionary tale about the hollowed-out services privatization provides, policymakers have since only increased the number of Vermonters housed in Lee Adjustment Center and other CCA prisons.

The Moral Consequences of Privatization

“I could write a book about violations [against Vermonters in private prisons],” says Frank Smith, of the Bluff City, Kansas-based Private Correction Working Group. “I visited Beattyville after the September 2004 riot and I have Open Records Act info on it. In Marion Adjustment Center (a CCA prison in St. Mary, Kentucky) there was sexual abuse by guards. CCA did very little to stop it or to help track down the offenders after they fled to avoid prosecution from MAC and the women’s prison also known as, the ‘rape factory’ at Otter Creek, Kentucky.”

The same year of the Lee Adjustment Center uprising, The Vermont Guardian reported that Republican Governor Jim Douglas requested corporate bids for the healthcare for (what was then) 1,700 in-state prisoners. Douglas went with the lowest bidder, Prison Health Services, for $645 million over ten years, and Vermonters under their care started literally dying from inadequate care, including Ashley Ellis, a 23 year old woman serving a 30 day sentence.

Prison Health Services broke the contract, not due to concerns related to the deaths, but due to their projected profits never materializing. Prison Legal News editor Paul Wright was quoted by The Associated Press as saying Vermont “cannot contract out the public’s fundamental right to know how their tax dollars are being spent and the quality of services the pubic is getting for its money.”

Powerful Allies, Monolithic Opponents

According to a bombshell 2008 memo detailing the cost of Vermont’s for-profit prisons use, newly sworn in Vermont Auditor Doug Hoffer wrote, “Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) does not provide mental health services. […] CCA does not provide services related to sexual abuse, substance abuse, or violent offenders.” According to the memo there’s a laundry list of programing provided here in Vermont facilities which are conspicuously absent at the for-profit prisons. “DOC programs not available through CCA include the Cognitive Self Change program for violent offenders; the Intensive Domestic Abuse Program; Batterers Intervention Program; the Network Against Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault Programs; and the Discover Program for those with substance abuse problems.”

Suzi Wizowaty, a Democratic Vermont State Representative from Burlington and lead sponsor of H.28 which states “As of July 1, 2013, all Vermont inmates shall be incarcerated in correctional facilities that are owned and operated by the federal, state, or local government (‘public’).” Wizowaty, in explaining her bill, makes the case that in this time of austerity Vermonters wanting to use these public dollars responsibly means using public oversight. “The idea that private prisons save money is illusory and has been debunked, the most optimistic studies show that they are a-wash in spending, because there are higher rates of recidivism, less job training, therapy and programming. All we are doing is putting profits in the pockets in the prison corporations.”

Another elite schism which lends credence to Vermont’s anti-privatization efforts comes from an unlikely place, Florida’s Republican Party. Florida Republican State Senator Mike Fasano led a successful effort to stop the privatization of 27 prisons, saying, “We have a 10 percent-plus unemployment rate in the state of Florida, and the last thing we should be doing is moving prisons that were paid for by the taxpayers into the hands of corporations, that would probably put many of these families out of work, who have mortgages to pay, homeowner’s insurance to pay, food on the table. This would be devastating to-not only to their families, but also to the community they live in.”

One might assume that given these financial and moral arguments policy makers would be feel compelled to discontinue using private prisons, if only because risk-adverse state governments typically dislike courting law suits. However, the prison corporations Wizowaty and Hoffer have critiqued are Wall Street monoliths. CCA send a letter to 48 states, dangling hundreds of millions of dollars in front of the cash strapped, austerity budget-minded governors, if only those states will privatize their prisons for the next twenty years. And, oh yeah, one other tiny piece of fine print: the prisons must be kept at least 90% full for the duration of the contract. Seemingly, this would create a contractual incentive for states to enact harsher sentencing guidelines and policing procedures. Meanwhile as best-selling author and legal scholar Glenn Greenwald writes, “Since there is no well funded lobby advocating for penal reform or promoting the interests of prisoners, the prison lobby goes virtually unchallenged and can buy the ability to shape pertinent laws at bargain basement prices.”

The military refers to mission creep as “the expansion of a project or mission beyond its original goals.” Corporate prisons who only know how to maximize profits for shareholders have expanded their mission to incarcerating 50% of immigrants detained in the US. Perhaps unsurprisingly the number of immigrants detained has exploded during the same period. Which begs the question: to what degree can a $1.7 billion per year prison corporation like CCA shape public policy? As a December 2008 Boston Phoenix article details: “[private prisons] regularly lobby against criminal punishment reforms, and for the creation of new criminal statues and overly harsh prison sentences. While these efforts are cloaked as calls for public safety, they are essentially creating more business for themselves […] CCA spent more than $2.7 million from 2006 through September 2008 on lobbying for stricter laws.”

Or, as CCA states in plainsong in its 2010 annual report: “Our growth is generally dependent upon our ability to obtain new contracts to develop and manage new corrections and detention facilities. This possible growth depends on a number of factors we cannot control, including crime rates and sentencing patterns in various jurisdictions and acceptance of privatization. The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction and sentencing practices or through decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by our criminal laws. For instance, any change with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration could affect the number or persons arrested, convicted and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them.”

The Primacy of Movement-Building

“It is absolutely essential that we raise the profile of this issue. We will not get anywhere without people calling their public officials, we will not get anywhere without that kind of organizing,” says Wizowaty. With that in mind, in a Burlington church basement this Martin Luther King Day, community organizers like Infinite Culcleasure began what they hope to be the first of many conversations about private prisons. “The grassroots component,” says Culcleasure, “is invaluable in overcoming the special interest and apathy that currently exists on this mass incarceration. With all of the competing crises for communities to manage, our greatest challenge in making this a watershed moment for prison reform is to make it a local issue that is directly relevant in people’s everyday lives.” With a network of 145 churches statewide interested in hosting similar conversations, it seems the tiny state of Vermonters are poised to bring forward a very different vision than corporate mass incarceration.

That said, the CCAs of the world are well-versed in utilizing their taxpayer dollars to leverage Vermont’s political elite: they helped finance former-Governor Douglas’ Inaugural Ball and donate to influential state senators’ re-elections. This is an industry which, as Glenn Greenwald notes in With Liberty and Justice for Some, has spent $3.3 million on state political parties and politicians in the 2002 and 2004 political cycles, according to a 2004 National Institute on Money In State Politics report.

Dick Sears, the influential state senator who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee that this bill will have to emerge from, has received more campaign donations from private prisons than any other policymaker in Vermont’s Statehouse. CCA’s annual reports assume that this rarified historical moment where The New Jim Crow is a bestseller, The House I Live In has won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, and Stop and Frisk has been declared unconstitutional won’t last forever. Certain social and political factors which prefigure a new social movement emerging are appearing: a loss of legitimacy in former institutions and attitudes, elite schisms, and unifying motivations. The question is one of organizing to scale. As with making health care a human right, decommissioning a failing nuclear power plant, and getting drivers’ licenses for migrant workers, if the Green Mountain State is to lead the country forward on the issue of private prisons, it will depend on Vermonters making good on their aspirations to build a statewide movement which will compel  VT senators such as Dick Sears to move this bill forward.

As the first of many Vermont church basement organizing conversations on private prisons unfolds, high schoolers hands are flashing in the air: “How is this moral?” “Why do corporations do this?” and in so many different ways “What can I do?” Infinite Culcleasure and Suzi Wizowaty have skillfully transfigured the church basement of teenagers into eager community organizers. Before the conversation reaches its midpoint the high schoolers are poised to bring this dialogue out into the larger community, to hold their elected officials accountable and draw Vermonters across the state together to share their stories and build a movement which can be a sufficient countervailing force to the influence of Wall Street’s private prisons. Afterwards the interstitial space of the Church hallway is luminous with excitement; the Pastor offers Suzi and Infinite the opportunity for similar conversations about for-profit prisons in congregations around Vermont. Just down the corridor a new generation of organizers is sending so many social media appeals to shutter the Lee Adjustment Center, shutter CCA and to shutter the private prison industry. Their prescient questions haunt me as I walk out into the snow: “How is this moral?” “Why do corporations do this?” and in so many different ways “What can I do?”

You've probably heard that Tom Harkin has announced that he will not be running for reelection to the Senate in 2014. 

You may think of him as a reliably liberal and pro-union voice in the Senate, and you'd be right. What you might be less aware of is that he's also one of the best friends of quacks, health scammers, and the antiscientific mindset in Congress.

He was one of the main sponsors of the law that in 1994 removed all regulation for dietary supplements sold across the country.  Among other things, what this law does is allow manufacturers to avoid almost all regulation and testing for their products while using code words to pretend that they will cure health conditions (e.g. “promotes normal cholesterol levels”, “slow down the doubling time of your PSA (male prostate) levels when cancer is present”). 

Does this make a difference to people? Well, when a dietary supplement called ephedra was killing people that would seem to be kind of important, wouldn't it?

 But that's not all. Harkin was also behind a measure to force the federal government to spend money on the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine.  In 1992 Harkin slipped a line in the report accompanying the NIH appropriations bill that created the NIH Office of Alternative Medicine with $1 million in seed money. (Bonus question: What do they call alternative medicine that works? A: Medicine.)

And in 2009 Harkin was able to slip a provision into the Affordable Care Act allowing for “alternative practitioners to be  treated as health care workers. This despite the fact that the claims of “therapeutic touch” have been soundly disproven and exposed as fraudulent.

 I kind of like Tom Harkin, but I won't miss Senator Woo.

Uh-oh, Jeff Wennberg, head of the right-wing Vermonters for Health Care Freedom, has found himself some statistics. And they’ve led him to a really creative conclusion:

Vermont is in trouble because we’re too generous to the elderly and the poor.

That’s the grim takeaway from his latest opinion piece, posted on VTDigger.

The stats in question show a population shift among young adults; Vermont suffered a net loss of educated people and a net gain of those with less than a high school diploma. The numbers come from the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems. Well, actually, they’re not really statistics; they’re estimates. And they date from the years 2005 to 2007 — according to Wennberg, “the most recent period available.”

I don’t necessarily accept these statistics as the final word on Vermont demographics, but just for the time being, let’s play along with Jeff. The shift, according to his chosen statistics:

Vermont suffered an estimated net loss of 704 people between the ages of 22 and 39. Among those with a high school degree and some college the loss was 44 individuals. But within this same age group Vermont suffered a net loss of 1,044 people with associate’s degrees or above. Over the same period Vermont imported a net 498 22- to 39-year-olds with less than a high school diploma.

To put it another way, smart people move out, dumb people move in. And why is this, pray tell, Mr. Wennberg?  

The first culprit is Vermont’s insistence on “community rating,” which bars health insurance providers from charging different rates to different age groups. See, by Jeff’s calculus, young people with good jobs are so weighed-down by the burden of subsidizing Grandpa’s health care that they flee the state. And if we only adopted VHCF’s free-market approach to health care, we’d stop losing young people.

Ignoring all other factors, such as greater opportunities elsewhere for many professions. And ignoring the moral and ethical dimension of letting insurance companies charge ultra-high premiums to senior citizens.

Also ignoring the other problems with ending “community rating,” like discouraging employers from hiring older workers and imposing ultra-high premiums on businesses in riskier fields, such as logging or granite carving or road contracting or manufacturing.

But that’s not the most outrageous thing in Wennberg’s piece. That would be his assertion that Vermont’s antipoverty programs are too generous, drawing poor people to our state like a hot pie on a windowsill:

Young families with children who rely on public assistance for health care, housing or basic subsistence would be hard pressed to find a more attractive state.

Great. Let’s impose Wennberg’s Galtian regime. Let’s get rid of those whiny old people and those poverty-ridden parasites, and watch Vermont thrive.

And feel your soul wither.  

Radioactive water is still being generated by the thousands-of-gallons at Fukushima, and where it will all go nobody knows.  

Except we really do know.  It is seeping and will continue to flow into that great planetary toilet and food reserve, the Pacific Ocean. Even after the amount held in retaining ponds is processed to remove as much contamination as is possible, that, too, will end up in the ocean.

Much as the nuclear industry would like us to move on to a plutonium-fueled future,  it cannot escape the nagging evidence that there is no resolution in sight to the enormous risks from nuclear waste.

They can bury it deep, if a willing repository site can be found; and just hope that seismic changes in the planet won’t unexpectedly disgorge the grave in a spectacular fountain of death.  

They can make plans to “recycle” spent fuel for use in hotsy new reactor designs that promise to reuse much of the remaining energy in the form of plutonium; but stockpiling that dangerous substance as fuel will

further open Pandora’s box to terrorists.

It is a puzzlement.

Now, just to remind us that there is something even more deadly than guns out there to worry us, here are a few tales of nuclear waste and contamination that illustrate the grim legacy of our relatively brief worldwide infatuation  with nuclear energy.

In Japan the volume of waste water overwhelming collection tanks at Fukushima is expected to triple over the next three years.

This piece of news about fish caught inside the Fukushima Daiichi harbor brings the point home.

In the U.S., our own Nuclear Regulatory Commission faces the likelihood that existing waste storage facilities will be exhausted for space by 2015.

No matter how successfully proponents deflect attention from the gaping hole in the bottom of our nuclear energy boat, it will just continue sinking under the weight of its growing mountain of waste.

*For those just joining us, “Bunched Knicker Syndrome” — a condition of extreme irascibility as a result of relatively minor provocation.

Old friend Angry Jack Lindley, the perpetually dyspeptic captain of the Tita– er, that is, chair of the VTGOP, has found a great way to keep warm during our first big cold snap of the season: working up a great big fit of outrage. Call it the Angry Jack Workout Program.

This time, his knickers are in a bunch over the release of the Shumlin Administration’s report on single payer health care. The study was commissioned from experts at the University of Massachusetts at a cost of $300,000; it concluded that Vermont could, indeed, offer better quality and universal access for slightly less money than the current system. But in Jack’s eyes, the report is so badly flawed that he wants the state to take a stand:

Refuse to pay the bill.

That’s right: welsh out on a legally incurred obligation.

Remember when the GOP used to be the party of responsibility — of sober, efficient, workmanlike government? Well now, as embodied in the person of Angry Jack, it’s the Party of Rage. Its stock in trade is the out-of-control overreaction to anything (however great or small) that offends its sensibilities.

But wait, there’s more. Just to show how far Angry Jack is removed from reality, he contrasts the Shumlin plan with the allegedly superior positions of failed candidates Randy Brock and Wendy Wilton. Obviously, Jack still blames the voters for turning their backs on Republican wisdom, rather than looking at his own party to figure out how it got so far out of the Vermont mainstream, and how to get back into it.

And we encourage this myopic approach to rebuilding a moribund party. Keep it up, Jack, and we’ll be in for an unbroken era of liberal dominance.  

Vermont has been known for going its own way, for following a tradition which includes notions such as

-small is good,

-local is good,

-community based solutions

Small, local community solutions when spread town by town can become regional and eventually statewide solutions.  Thrift, recycling, reuse, CSAs, farmers’ markets are easily embraced in Vermont because that’s how we do things here.  “Doing without” is a guiding principle for many of us today.  

Yet in a few short years,

-big

-international  

-corporate solutions

seem to be replacing our Vermont tradition of scale and self-reliance.   Instead of leading the fight against climate change by example of what we do best – small, local, community – we appear ready to throw in our lot with big, global and top-down, just like those ‘less enlightened’ states we like to criticize.  Seemingly ‘easy fixes’ such as industrial wind farms have replaced what our Vermont ancestors would have chosen if facing this issue today – smaller, community-generated and distributed energy solutions and reductions that would encourage buy-in from most if not all Vermonters.  

If we want to lead the fight against climate change, I propose we do it by following our traditional scale and behaviors – with diverse, ingenuitive solutions that not only bring us together but provide a REAL EXAMPLE for others to follow.  Solutions where each of us is asked to be part of the answer rather than sacrifice some of us to an “easy” solution.  We’ve done that many times… why not do it now?  

GO SMALL, VERMONT.