In a brief meeting today, the state Canvassing Committee certified the results of the November 6 election. No surprises, no protests, no accusations. After the August primary kerfuffle, I bet Secretary of State Jim Condos and Elections Division chief Kathy Scheele were relieved.

(It was also Scheele’s last rodeo; she will retire in the near future. The prospect made her particularly cheerful today.)

No surprises, but a few notes to pass along…

Voter turnout was 68%, which was down from the last three Presidential contests: 72% in 2008, 70% in 2004, and 69% in 2000. But Vermont reached a record high in registered voters this year, at 461,000. So the actual number of votes might have been higher this year, even though the percentage was down.

The hullabaloo over military ballots is ending not with a bang, but a whimper. In a deal with the Department of Justice, state elections officials will continue to accept ballots cast by military personnel overseas until this Friday. There are only about 50 ballots still outstanding, nowhere near enough to influence any outcomes. In fact, the canvassers agreed to certify the results with the understanding that all military votes received by the deadline will be added to the official final count.

Also, Condos said something I hadn’t heard before: “We encouraged the Department of Justice to file suit, because we didn’t have the authority to extend the deadline.” Which explains why a settlement came so quickly after the filing: the two parties had agreed on a resolution before the suit was filed.

After the jump: the cost of major-party status, and a smattering of votes for Annette Smith.

The fact that the Liberty Union Party regained major-party status (thanks to the fact that LUP candidate Mary Alice Herbert was the only option to Condos on the ballot for Secretary of State) will cost the state roughly $80,000. That’s because the state will be obligated to conduct a primary for the LUP in 2014.  

Exact numbers for write-in candidates were not released, only an overall “write-in” total for each race. The state doesn’t tally individual totals unless they might affect the outcome of a race. (All the write-in ballots are on file, so anyone who feels so inclined can go to the office and do their own count.) But it can be inferred that multipurpose activist Annette Smith drew somewhere between 400 and 700 write-in votes for Governor.

That’s because in the races for US Senate, US Congress, Lieutenant Governor and Auditor, the number of write-ins was almost equal — 250-275 each. For Treasurer, it was 198. It was higher for Secretary of State, 876, due in large part to the absence of a Republican or Progressive candidate. (Well, Condos was the Republican and Progressive candidate as well as the Democrat, but you know what I mean.) There were 588 write-ins for Attorney General. But in the race for Governor, there were 969 write-ins. If we assume a baseline of 250-300 write-ins in any race, and give Smith full credit for the increase in gubernatorial write-ins, that still leaves her short of 700 votes. Which strikes me as a rather poor showing.

I know that, as my esteemed colleague Paul Heintz has pointed out, it’s hard to stage a write-in campaign and it’s hard to get voters to cast write-in ballots. But still, Smith’s constituency (centered on anti-wind power activists) was a strongly motivated group, easily identifiable and targetable by a candidate who is also a highly visible leader in their cause.

If the anti-wind movement is growing and spreading, shouldn’t Smith have been able to attract more than a few hundred votes? I think that’s fair to say.

Electoral trivia: When you look at the county-by-county breakdowns, you see how dominant Chittenden County is. Nearly 26% of all Vermont votes were cast in Chittenden County; no other county had as much as 10% of the statewide vote. Chittenden also led the way in absentee ballots, with 30%. Most other counties were closer to 20% absentee.  (The statewide absentee rate was 25%.)

The top vote-getter in the state was Jim Condos. (Hmm, the guy in charge of counting the votes. Hmm.) With no major-party opposition, he drew 225,801 votes. Peter Welch was second at 208,600, ahead of Bernie Sanders by 752 votes. Barack Obama was next, with 199,239.

And Condos is expecting lower turnout in 2014, with no Presidential election and also no race for U.S. Senate in Vermont. His guess is somewhere in the upper 50s to lower 60s, compared to this year’s 68%.  

A week after the 2012 presidential election I stumbled across this story: ‘We the People’ Petitions Filed in Nineteen States Seeking Permission to Secede from the Union.

Neetzan Zimmerman, who reported the story for the Gawker website, counted “at least nineteen” secession petitions that have been filed. There are actually petitions from people in 28 states (as of this moment, it changes) requesting the Obama Administration to “Peacefully grant the State of [fill in the blank] to withdraw from the United States of America and create its own NEW government” that are currently posted on the official White House petition website. All of the secession petitions were filed or posted after Election Day, November 6, 2012, with Louisiana first off the mark on November 7. Most were filed Saturday, November 10, 2012, with a few a day later.

Some of the states – Arkansas, Alabama, Florida, Missouri (which has two competing petitions, as do Georgia and South Carolina), Arizona, Tennessee, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana, Kentucky, and Mississippi – you could pick off either the Red-Romney-Ryan (RRR) state electoral map (minus blue Florida), or a map of the late Southern Confederacy. (Although Virginia once led the seceding states in the late War of Northern Aggression, it was a blue state last week and had no petition for secession filed as of Monday night).

But Michigan? Well, Michigan (a blue state in the election), with its state-imposed corporate control of towns and cities ruled bankrupt by those who wish to buy, sell, or otherwise convert municipal assets to their own corporate uses and/or abrogate union contracts, might be considered a special case, seeking to keep the fascist* power structure it has built.

(*”Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.” ~ Benito Mussolini, who, after all, would have known. See also the rest of the article here, and of course Wikipedia.)

After the jump, the rest of the new secessionist states, and petitioning to secede.

Then there are the other wannabe-runaway residents of states not associated with the last major (not so peaceful) attempt at secession: Delaware (blue), Pennsylvania (blue), New Jersey (blue), New York (blue) and Ohio (blue); California, Oregon, and Colorado (all blue); North Dakota (red), Montana (red), Indiana (red), and Nevada (blue).

The petition website is based on the First Amendment to the United States Constitution:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Any petition (and other issues are represented, such as legalizing and taxing marijuana, signing an executive order along the lines of ENDA, and establishing a nationwide standard for Congressional redistricting, among others), filed on this official whitehouse.gov website, that attains 25,000 signatures within 30 days will get an official response from the Obama Administration. Texas is already there with over 48,000 signatures. Louisiana may get there before the end of the week (23,118 signatures as of Monday night).

Wow. This movement suggests a major tantrum by the disappointed RRRs. They didn’t win, so they’re going to try to run away, taking their states with them.

So, the question is: Shall we selectively encourage the red-beat, deadbeat states by adding our signatures to their petitions? Or take a moral stand for the 50 state union (or 51 if Puerto Rico makes it in, 52 if DC could get the vote)?

Or imagine what the President’s answer might be;

Dear Mostly Red States,

First, you all know that many of you tried this secession thing before, and it wasn’t very successful: a lot of people died, it set back economic development in the seceding states for generations, and, some might say, the hard feelings even now haven’t been resolved.

Second, it is not in the power of the President to grant or deny membership in the United States of America. If it were, we might someday become the Untied States of America. If we ran the country like a business, we would have had to let you go a long time ago as an economic drag on USA, Inc.

Third, I campaigned on the idea that we’re all in this together, red state, blue state, purple state, rainbow states, all states. Without you, we wouldn’t have any place to dispose of our unexpended tax revenues. Without us, you wouldn’t have any tax revenues to dispense. We are all in this together.

Now, I’m a parent of two spirited and sometimes rambunctious children. Aaannd I understand that you all need a little time-out to think this through. So, you may go to your rooms and think about our connections as a people, a nation, together. You can c’mon out on January 21, 2013 if you’re ready to behave yourselves and get along with your brother and sister states.

Sincerely,

Barack Obama

President of the United States of America

(A worthy cause, although most of these wingnuts carry around a copy of the Constitution. (As a talisman.) – promoted by jvwalt)

In response to all the petitions to Obama to let states secede, I've started my own. Please sign it and spread the word!  It's probably the most important thing you can do until 2014…

ntodd

PS–A little more musing on secession here.

Heroic Horndog Edition.

Our military veterans, for putting themselves in the service of their country. They’ve often been misled, they’ve often been put in harm’s way for no good reason, and yes, they’ve sometimes crossed the line in difficult circumstances. But the vast majority served for honorable reasons and deserve our thanks.

I never served; I was just old enough to escape the Vietnam-era draft lottery. But my dad was a soldier in World War II. And a few years ago I recorded an oral-history interview with him (which I strongly recommend to anyone with aging parents) and heard the story. It’s nothing terribly dramatic; he entered service late in the war, was shipped across the Pacific in a slow, uncomfortable transport, and saw some action (and a lot more post-battle devastation) in the Philippines. After the war, he was part of the American occupation force in Japan.

Again, nothing much compared to many vets’ experiences. But it was a dramatic and traumatic passage in the life of a young man who grew up on a western Michigan farm. I’m grateful for his service, and for the service of (almost) everyone who’s worn a uniform.

____________________________________

the usually reliable VTDigger, for some gratuitous post-election bashing of Auditor-elect Doug Hoffer. I’ve already recounted the musings of Digger’s designated pundit Jon Margolis, who insisted that he was right about Hoffer being a dour, charisma-free, and fatally flawed candidate, even after Hoffer did him the discourtesy of winning the election. But I shouldn’t overlook Digger’s post-election wrap story, posted under Anne Galloway’s byline but co-written by multiple Digger staffers. So I can’t say for sure who emitted this little kidneystone:  

When he took the podium, Hoffer mumbled into the microphone and blamed the pundits for inaccurately calling the race. He didn’t prepare a speech.

Jeebus. WTF is that supposed to mean? Are you saying he was drunk? Or just unprepared and ill-tempered? Hey, I was there on Tuesday night, and I found that description to be absolutely misleading. I saw a guy unaccustomed to the spotlight unguardedly displaying his simple humanity, not a bilious abacus-flipper reluctantly coming face to face with the accountant’s worst nightmare: other people.

This isn’t the only instance of passive-aggressive post-election coverage of Doug Hoffer. It’s as if reporters and pundits almost blame Doug for daring to win an election they believed he’d lose. And for daring to point out how wrong they were.

After the jump: A walk to major-party status, a cheap university, young turks, humorless Vermonters and clueless Republicans.

the Diamondstone Family Singers, d/b/a the Liberty Union Party, for regaining major-party status on the Vermont ballot. Its candidate for Secretary of State, Mary Alice Herbert, took 13% of the vote as the only person listed on the ballot besides incumbent Democrat Jim Condos.  (And a little Thumbs Down to the Vermont GOP for failing to field a candidate and allowing this to happen.)

Hebert didn’t bother campaigning; she even declined an invitation to debate Condos, and described her effort as “standing rather than running.” But, because she was the only recourse for people who just didn’t want to vote for Condos (or leave the ballot blank), she ensures that the Liberty Union Party will have its own primary in 2014 (Diamondstone v. Diamondstone?), and may well be invited to more debates.

The University of Vermont, for maintaining the unfortunate practice of balancing its budget on the backs of part-time instructors. Contract talks for part-timers are at an impasse, and the administration is offering a pay hike of 1%. That’s one stinkin’ percent.

Colleges and universities across the country have become more and more dependent on part-time adjunct faculty to teach classes at relatively low cost. There’s a big pool of underemployed people with advanced degrees who will settle for a small paycheck as better than nothing. (And hope they’re getting a foot in the door toward future employment if they try really hard and don’t make waves.) And by teaching, they help the institutions create the next generation of desperate graduates willing to settle for a small paycheck…

I once taught a course as an adjunct at a small private college. And I tell you, for the amount of time I put into it, I could have gotten a better hourly rate flipping burgers. It seems fundamentally at odds with the mission and values of an institution that is never shy about trumpeting its important role in bettering our society.

All the young and energetic number-crunchers, organizers, and tacticians who form the foundation of the Democratic Party’s victories in Vermont and across the country. It’s becoming clear that the Democrats have reinvented politics, taking Karl Rove’s work in a new and more positive direction, and making dramatic advances while Rove is still stuck in the year 2002 and VTGOP Chair “Angry Jack” Lindley told the Freeploid: “They’re using technology. We’re still using a horse and buggy.”

The Vermont Dems’ technological, tactical and strategic advantages have been chronicled by Seven Days, the Vermont Press Bureau, VTDigger, and (finally, belatedy) by the Freeploid. If you’d like to see a national perspective on all this, I suggest “A Vast Left-Wing Competency,” an article by Sasha Issenberg at Slate.com.  

The story in brief: Karl Rove had pioneered new techniques in the early 2000s. But by 2006, the Democrats had caught up. And then they kept going:

Major donors like George Soros decided not to focus their funding on campaigns to win single elections, as they had in the hopes of beating Bush in 2004, but instead to seed institutions committed to learning how to run better campaigns.

… the left has birthed an unexpected subculture. It now contains a full-fledged electioneering intelligentsia, focused on integrating large-scale survey research with randomized experimental methods to isolate particular populations that can be moved by political contact.

Basically, it’s Moneyball in politics: the use of intelligence to find unexploited advantages that help defeat an opponent with much deeper pockets.

a tiny handful of sourpusses, for inducing the cancellation of a fundraising calendar produced by the Highfields Center for Composting. The “Hot Compost” calendar featured women in suggestive poses in agricultural settings, along the lines of numerous such tongue-in-cheek calendars of recent years, including at least two in Vermont. It was planned as part of its Kickstarter campaign to raise money for a compost research center.

Highfields quickly scrapped the calendar and issued an apology after receiving a tiny number of very vociferous complaints that the images “objectified” women, etc., etc. And the complainers still aren’t satisfied; one of them rejected Highfields’ apology and said the calendar “appealed to the worst male instincts which are attracted to and relish the degradations of women.”

All I can say is, the “worst male instincts” can find a lot more, shall we say, inspiring material in 30 seconds on the Internet. They aren’t looking for fundraising calendars. And God knows, there are still more than enough real battles to fight in the war on sexism; this one doesn’t rate in the top million.

Tayt Brooks (International Man of Mystery), Lenore “Miss Daisy” Broughton, Darcie “Hack” Johnston, the Robster, El Jefe General John McClaughry, and Angry Jack Lindley, et al., for old times’ sakes. Guys, you made it a whole lot of fun to write about politics here at Green Mountain Daily. Your unintentionally humorous antics provided an infinitely renewable resource of comedic material for us, and also made it much easier for the Democrats to pull off an historic victory in 2012. I will be forever grateful for your cluelessness, your arrogance, the pure unfiltered rage that erupted on a regular basis, and the wasting of large quantities of conservative dollars.

And, if VTDigger is correct, we can look forward to more such antics in the future:

Darcie Johnston, who lately ran GOP gubernatorial candidate Randy Brock’s campaign, says Broughton will be back in the next election cycle. And Johnston herself is thinking about starting a Super PAC for Vermonters for Health Care Freedom, an anti-single payer 501c4, as soon as possible.

Oh please please please, make it so! I’ve said before that if rich people like Broughton had any brains — or any real sense of how free markets operate — they would punish the abject failures of political operatives like Hack Johnston and the Tayter. Fortunately for us, they don’t, so they will continue to pour money down the ratholes of Super PACs led by high-paid consultants with huge egos and unbroken records of failure.

Go ahead, Miss Daisy. Rehire the International Man. Give a bunch of money to the Hack. Help El Jefe and the Robster pollute our airwaves with conservative dogma that convinces no one. As a liberal, the last thing I want is for you to act like a smart businessperson and hire people who can actually do the job. That might present a challenge for Dems and Progs. Another round of 2012 will not.  

Nationally in 2009 3.6 million people worked at or below the minimum hourly rate. That’s a large part of the population clinging to or off the side of a financial cliff.

Well November 9th the Vermont Department of Labor announced that the state’s minimum wage will go up on January 1st 2013. From the current rate of $8.46 it will go up fourteen cents to $8.60. For tipped workers the current $4.10 will gain seven cents bringing that to $4.17.The increase is a result from the rate being adjusted to the consumer price index.

Vermont is one of sixteen states with rates higher than the federal minimum of $7.25. Washington State is the highest at $9.06, five states have no minimum rate and the rest of the states are at or below the federal rate.

How far does the minimum go? [after the jump]  

Here is some perspective in the form of a chart that shows how many hours per week minimum wage workers would have to work to afford rent and utilities on a modest two bedroom apartment. 

 And how about Papa John’s pizza owner John Schattner who is literally at the other end of the minimum wage. Schattner recently said that he feels he just has to make up the costs of the Affordable Care Act by passing them on to his minimum wage employees and his customers.

“I got in a bunch of trouble for this,” he said, referring to the comments he made in August, according to Naples News. “That’s what you do, is you pass on costs. Unfortunately, I don’t think people know what they’re going to pay for this.”

So Papa John Schattner (a Romney supporter and fundraiser) will reduce workers hours and raise his pizza prices too.  Must have been a heart wrenching decision for a man worth $402.6 million back in 2006 that lives in a 40,000 sq. ft mega mansion. The place is complete with a 22-car underground parking garage, built-in car wash and motorized turntable to arrange the limousines  

Minimum wage, Yah!  It really is the least they can do.

While looking up something on the Internet today, I came across the writings of technology journalist Robert X. Cringely. He’s been one of America’s leading tech writers since the 1980s. He’s a very credible, very connected reporter on the world of technology business.  

For the past several years, Cringely has written some remarkably prescient stuff about IBM — and most of it has been bad, particularly for the company’s domestic workforce. Back in 2007, he predicted an acceleration in domestic reductions.

In 2007, IBM had an American workforce of 121,000. In 2010 it stopped reporting the number of domestic employees. But according to an IBM union that tracks layoffs, by 2011 its American workforce was down to 98,000. Headcount has continued to decrease since then, with major layoffs in early and mid-2012. And there are signs of another round of cuts before the end of this year.

So Cringely was dead-on. And earlier this year*, he got a look at IBM’s internal plans for the next three years, and they include a virtual depopulation of its American division: a reduction in US headcount of 78%.

*He wrote these pieces in April 2012, around the time of IBM’s last big round of layoffs. But, as will be noted below, they failed to attract any attention in the mainstream media.

That’s four American employees out of every five. What are Essex Junction’s chances of surviving the next three years? Even if we gave IBM huge tax breaks, ultra-cheap electricity, and built the Circ Highway overnight?

No, this has nothing to do with Vermont’s business climate or costs or Act 250 or traffic jams or the Democratic majority or the evil that environmentalists do. It has to do with IBM’s all-out push to cut costs and increase earnings. Remember this when IBM closes down and the Republicans scream bloody murder.

Details after the jump.  

Cringely reports that IBM plans to grow earnings-per-share (EPS) to $20 by 2015. (Right now, it’s around $13.) And…

The primary method for accomplishing this feat, according to the plan, will be by reducing US employee head count by 78 percent in that time frame.

Reducing employees by more than three quarters in three years is a bold and difficult task. What will it leave behind?  Who, under this plan, will still be a US IBM employee in 2015? Top management will remain, the sales organization will endure, as will employees working on US government contracts that require workers to be US citizens. Everyone else will be gone. Everyone.

Want some more good news? IBM has done everything it can to conceal the scope of its domestic cutbacks. As I said above, it no longer reports the size of its US workforce. But also…

IBM manages to skirt the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act requiring advance notification of layoffs or plant closings by structuring these resource actions to stay just below the numbers required to provide notifications at given locations.

So when it comes, we can expect it to come as stealthily as possible.

Cringely wrote these pieces in April 2012. They attracted a lot of attention in technology circles, but failed to penetrate into the mainstream media:

My recent IBM columns have stirred up a lot of interest everywhere except in the press. One reporter called from Dubuque, Iowa, but that’s all. This is distressing because the story I’m telling has not been contradicted by anyone. Nobody, inside or outside IBM, has told me I have it wrong. In fact they tend to tell me things are even worse than I have portrayed.

As a reporter I know there are always more stories than I have time or space to write, but this silence from the U.S. business press is deafening. Here is a huge news story that is being completely ignored.

It has certainly been ignored in the Vermont media. And it shouldn’t be. I hope someone takes this up and pursues it (see below). Because if Cringely is right — and he’s batting close to 1.000 when it comes to IBM cutbacks — then Vermont will lose IBM within the next three years.

And when it happens, nobody should be surprised. Absolutely nobody.

p.s. A little free advice for other media outlets. If you contact IBM, of course they will issue a carefully-worded denial along the lines of “We have no plans at this time to leave Vermont, which has been a very good location for us.” If you stop there, you won’t have a story.

I’d suggest contacting Cringely and getting his take, along with anything he can share about IBM’s planning documents. Then talk to other knowledgeable people who can establish Cringely’s bona fides. And check in with some observers of the tech marketplace and see if their assessment of IBM (aggressively cost-cutting, single-mindedly focused on EPS) agrees with his. Then you should have enough for a story.

Just a little point of comparison here.

Here's a picture of what Occupy is doing now.

 As is now being reported in the Detroit Free Press:

  NEW YORK — The social media savvy that helped Occupy Wall Street protesters create a grassroots global movement last year is proving to be a strength in the wake of Superstorm Sandy as members and organizers of the group fan out across New York to deliver aid, including hot meals, medicine and blankets. They're the ones who took food and water to Glenn Nisall, a 53-year-old resident of Queens' hard-hit and isolated Rockaway section who lost power and lives alone, with no family nearby.

And in the Times:

ON Wednesday night, as a fierce northeaster bore down on the weather-beaten Rockaways, the relief groups with a noticeable presence on the battered Queens peninsula were these: the National Guard, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Police and Sanitation Departments — and Occupy Sandy, a do-it-yourself outfit recently established by Occupy Wall Street.

 So the response from Occupy: We Got This. Go to the page and you'll see link after link of ways the Occupy movement is helping people hurt by Hurricane Sandy.

 And it doesn't stop there. Occupy Wall Street has been making headlines again thanks to its new role as the main source of mutual aid to those affected by Hurricane Sandy. In addition to supplying blankets, food and clean water to those who are still without power and shelter, the OWS movement recently announced a new plan to bolster the 99%. 

 Through a new effort called the”Rolling Jubilee,” Occupy Wall Street plans to start buying distressed debt (medical bills, student loans, etc.) in order to forgive it. This brilliant idea has been in development for months, and it has the power to mobilize the power of crowdfunding to help those who are struggling in a way that has never been seen before. 

And the response from the Tea Party? This is Obama's Katrina. We should be trying to hit him hard on this!

Ask me if I'm surprised.

As Republicans hold their heads in bleary-eyed befuddlement all over America, perhaps no where in Vermont are they more at a loss than on the home turf of Vermonter’s First poster boy, Tayt Brooks.

GOP campaign signs litter the yard of Dustin Degree’s St. Albans pied a terre; some standing, some leaning and some fallen down like drunken soldiers.  A couple of errant “Romney”signs have even drifted into the parking lane.

Perhaps in symbolic defiance, signs for Degree, Casey Toof and Norm McAllister, all over town, seem to be the only ones that have not yet been removed .

Degree seems certain to request a recount of his close Senate race with Democrat Don Collins, where he lost by a mere 25 votes.  There seems to be no word from Casey Toof who was defeated in a bid for Degree’s House seat by Democrat Mike McCarthy.  The vote spread was only 20 votes, but being a House race, the overall tally was significantly smaller than for the Senate.

But it is not the losers who are kicking up the angry dust around here.  It is curiously sore winner Norm McAllister who, when asked about the impact of Vermonters First on the election, was quoted in the Weekend Messenger:

“I don’t think it hurt us.  What hurt was you guys’ negative ads, writings that you did.  That’s what hurt us.  Vermonters First didn’t hurt us.  It was you peoples’ reporting that hurt us, because you made it sound like it was something unusual.” he said.

McAllister went on to double-down on some of the claims made by Vermonters First in their attack ads; claims that have since been dismissed by fact-checkers.

He had particularly harsh words for the Messenger when it came to the subject of Tayt Brooks, whom McAllister said was “barbecued” by the paper.

Mr. McAllister seems to be gunning for anyone and everyone, including Mike McCarthy with whom he is destined to serve in the Legislature.  He objects to the fact that McCarthy, who made a last minute decision to enter the House race, did not resign his chairmanship of the Franklin County Democratic Party.  Why that would be an issue for him is beyond me, but there you are.

The Franklin County delegation has traditionally been characterized by cross-party camaraderie.  I am told that Dustin Degree has routinely chauffeured Democrat Kathy Keenan to the statehouse over the two years that they’ve served side-by-side.  Republican Carolyn Branagan of Georgia was quick to denounce claims made by Vermonters First that the Democrats were planning to introduce sales tax on child care, healthcare, and other every day services.  Most seem to recognize that they are neighbors and local representatives first, and political rivals only second.

It will be interesting to see how Mr. McAllister navigates those waters now that the Republican census from Franklin County is down a couple of men. Progressive Cindy Weed of Enosburg is in the mix too, having defeated incumbent Republican Peter Perley.

‘Should be an interesting session!

“Keeps on going…?”

We had no sooner emerged, dazed and happy, from the election, than Franklin County got hit with a blast of really bad news.  

A  60-year+ economic fixture in St. Albans Town, Energizer announced Thursday that it will soon be closing its doors in the Town and laying off all 165 employees.  

Tim Smith, executive director of the Franklin County Industrial Development Corporation believes the county will not be seriously impacted by the closing, given that projected economic growth includes a planned expansion of Mylan with 150 new jobs; but the announcement seems to challenge a popular conservative talking point, that tax breaks are the best way to retain quality investment in Vermont.  

According to Fred Kenney, executive director of the Vermont Economic Progress Council:

In 2005, the Vermont Economic Progress Council provided $2.5 million in tax credits over five years to Energizer, making the credits contingent on adding jobs and making capital improvements to the plant in St. Albans…Kenney said the level of employment at the plant has been dropping steadily in recent years.

Mr. Kenney further states that, despite Energizer’s possible non-compliance with the terms of those tax breaks, the state might not even be successful if it sought to reclaim the lost revenue.

Due to decreased demand for the type of specialty battery produced at the St. Albans facility, the company is downsizing; and even though those batteries will continue to be produced in Malaysia, by workers earning Malaysian salaries, they have no further use for their St. Albans workers.

Many were the times that Governor Douglas harped on how we would lose IBM if we didn’t do this or that for them (insert “keep Vermont Yankee going”; “build the Circ Highway,” etc.) regardless of the environmental consequences; and many were the times he scolded that Vermont is “bad for business.”

It appears, in this case that, having enjoyed a sweet tax deal for several years, Energizer would still prefer to build their batteries in Malaysia, where minimum wages have just been raised for workers to $297. per month.

I am sure that, if St. Albans workers could live on Malaysian wages, the tax break might have succeeded in buying Energizer’s loyalty as it was supposed to do.  But as things now stand, Vermont is just out a whole bunch of money it could have used to retrain the 165 displaced workers.

When IBM finally raises its skirts and exits Vermont, it will not be because we haven’t bought enough of its loyalty through corporate blackmail.  It will be to take its Vermont operations to a distant land where workers earn pennies on the U.S. dollar.

What will it take to get policy makers to realize that we cannot compete on the “bottom line” unless we are all prepared to live like third world laborers?  

We need instead to compete on “quality of life” measures, like universal healthcare, exceptional schools, a clean and beautiful natural environment, superb local foods, and a creative and exciting cultural milieu.  

That takes public investment, which we cannot make if we become the bargain basement for corporate location shopping.

After spending most of this year siphoning money from Randy Brock’s campaign to buy expensive out-of-state political consulting, polling, and advertising services, and to pay herself eight G’s a month plus expenses, chief consultant Darcie Johnston has had an epiphany:

It’s all about the data.

So she says in a VTDigger article that builds on earlier stories from Seven Days and the Vermont Press Bureau, in exploring the huge organizational advantages that Vermont Democrats enjoyed over the VTGOP.

Yes, the second-biggest waste of money in Vermont politics (number 1 is, of course, Vermonter(s) First) has suddenly discovered that the secret to success isn’t money after all!

While the Dems knew who their potential voter bases were and how to target them, the Republicans didn’t.

… “We need a voter file that is well developed and computer driven and ID’d using every demographic we can find and overlaid with every piece of social media information that can be mined,” said Johnston on Friday. “And it needs to start tomorrow.”

Funny. She just managed a campaign completely based on TV ads, mailers, and smearing the Democrats, and NOW she realizes the key is data?  

Say, Darcie, how much money did you spend on data when it could have made a difference — during the campaign you just managed into the toilet? Well, the implicit message in her “analysis” is (surprise, surprise) it wasn’t her fault.

The problem, she said, wasn’t with the candidates, who she said were strong this year, it was the lack of information readily available to effectively campaign for those candidates.

Okay, first of all, the candidates were “strong”? Randy Brock, who spent hundreds of thousands and drew fewer votes than the unknown and underfunded Cassandra Gekas? Wendy Wilton, who utterly failed to convince voters she was the apolitical technocrat depicted in her campaign? Jack “Six Teats” McMullen? The Secretary of State vacancy? John MacGovern? Mark Donka?

Phil Scott was strong. The rest of the ticket was pathetic.

Johnston’s profound cluelessness aside, the most notable thing in that paragraph is her subtle shifting of blame from the Brock campaign to the VTGOP: “the lack of information readily available.”

See, it wasn’t her job to get that information; her campaign collapsed because it wasn’t “readily available.”

Funny. I never heard one peep out of Johnston about this during the campaign. But now that it’s all gone up in flames, and Randy Brock has grounds to sue her for consumer fraud*, she’s conveniently found a scapegoat.

*She’s like a contractor who makes a roof out of plywood and, when the first snowstorm trashes the whole thing, comes back and says “Y’know, what you really need is shingles.”

One final note about good investments. The Digger article spotlights one of the Dems’ many young insiders who made all the difference in building an unbeatable organization: John Faas.

Over the last five months, Faas has created a database that shows Vermonters’ voting history, contact information, any previous contact with the party, the districts voters live in and party-specific modeling information. The Vermont Democratic Party has paid Faas about $9,516 so far this year.

Got that? $9,516 for Faas for the entire campaign. Approximately the same amount Darcie Johnston got paid every goddamn month (salary plus expenses).

Oh, Darcie. As a liberal, let me offer you best wishes in your future as a political hack. As long as you’re in the game, our side has a whole lot better chance of winning.