I just got a call (around 6:45 on 2/29/2012) from “Independent Voter Research.” The poll asked five questions about the Vermont Republican primary scheduled for next Tuesday.

The call was completely automated. First, a voice said something like “This is a survey from Independent Voter Research.” There were five questions. I didn’t record the call, so this is from memory and is probably not totally accurate:

Will you be voting in the upcoming Vermont Republican presidential primary on March 6? Press 1 for yes and 2 for no.

Regardless of whether or not you’re planning to vote in the primary, which candidate do you support? In alphabetical order, the choices are press 1 for New Gingrich, press 2 for Ron Paul, press 3 for Mitt Romney, press 4 for Rick Santorum.

Which political party do you most align yourself with? Press 1 for Republican, press 2 for Democrat, Press 3 for independent.

For statistical purposes only, please indicate your gender. Press 1 for male, press 2 for female.

For statistical purposes only, please indicate your age. Press 1 for 35 and under, press 2 for 35-45, (I don’t remember all the categories).

Thank you for your time. You can reach us at 866-540-3140

Calling 866-540-3140 reached an automated voice that said “Thank you for calling Independent Voter Research. All agents are unavailable,” then a busy signal.

Googling the number found this article from Rolling Stone: Romney camp tapped volunteers for deceptive polling effort in Michigan.

Apparently the polling is connected to the Romney campaign. The call I received today presented the poll as an “Independent” poll, and there was no disclosure that it was connected to the Romney campaign.

This one’s a few days old, but I just came across it and couldn’t resist.

Researchers at Cal-Berkeley have conducted a series of studies indicating that upper-class people are more likely than lower-class people to lie, cheat, and break the law.

“We found that it is much more prevalent for people in the higher ranks of society to see  greed and self-interest … as  good pursuits,” said Paul Piff, lead author of the study and a doctoral candidate at Berkeley. “This resonates with a lot of current events these days.”

Sure does.

After the jump: Seven signs of malignity, and Rick Santorum restores my peace of mind.

Piff et al did a total of seven studies. From the abstract of their paper, published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (link to abstract; online access to full paper restricted to subscribers):

In studies 1 and 2, upper-class individuals were more likely to break the law while driving, relative to lower-class individuals. In follow-up laboratory studies, upper-class individuals were more likely to exhibit unethical decision-making tendencies (study 3), take valued goods from others (study 4), lie in a negotiation (study 5), cheat to increase their chances of winning a prize (study 6), and endorse unethical behavior at work (study 7) than were lower-class individuals. Mediator and moderator data demonstrated that upper-class individuals’ unethical tendencies are accounted for, in part, by their more favorable attitudes toward greed.

In Study #6, the prize involved was $50. So rich people are willing to cheat for pocket change.

Gosh. And here I thought that greed is good, that wealth is a sign of God’s favor, and that poverty is the outward manifestation of faulty character. Maybe not?

Large sums of money may give people greater feelings of entitlement, causing those people to be the most averse to wealth distribution, Piff continued.  Poorer people may be less likely to cheat, because they are more dependent on their community at large, he said.

But wait a minute– this study came out of a university! And Cal-Berkeley, no less! There you go: liberal academia, brainwashing our young, etc., etc., Rick Santorum says so.

Whew! I think we can safely ignore this piece of Communist trash and get on with the Ayn Randification of our society.  

Well, Marilyn finally got to attend Town Meeting in full accordance with her civil rights. Franklin observed a one year moratorium on prayer at Town Meeting today.  _________________________________________________

Town Meeting Day in Franklin County has come to mean one thing in particular for me; a check-in to see how First Amendment champion, Marilyn Hackett is faring in her effort to have public prayer dropped from the Town Meeting agenda in Franklin.  

To my mind, Marilyn is making the ultimate argument for that freedom of conscience that some would call “religion.”

Every year, Marilyn requests that Town Meeting not commence with the customary Christian invocation, and every year that invocation nevertheless takes place; but Marilyn does not give up.

She’s been told that she is welcome to leave the room before the prayer begins, and to return once it is over; but Marilyn quite reasonably argues that this essentially “closes” the meeting to her, and asks instead that a secular invocation distributed by the Vermont League of Cities and Towns be substituted for the Christian prayer.  

Those who must share a prayer can do that elsewhere before coming to Town Meeting, which is supposed be an open citizen interface, in adherence with Vermont law:

Chapter I, Article 3 – Freedom in religion; right and duty of religious worship

That all persons have a natural and unalienable right, to worship Almighty God, according to the dictates of their own consciences and understandings, as in their opinion shall be regulated by the word of God; and that no person ought to, or of right can be compelled to attend any religious worship, or erect or support any place of worship, or maintain any minister, contrary to the dictates of conscience, nor can any person be justly deprived or abridged of any civil right as a citizen, on account of religious sentiments, or peculiar mode of religious worship; and that no authority can, or ought to be vested in, or assumed by, any power whatever, that shall in any case interfere with, or in any manner control the rights of conscience, in the free exercise of religious worship. Nevertheless, every sect or denomination of Christians ought to observe the sabbath or Lord’s day, and keep up some sort of religious worship, which to them shall seem most agreeable to the revealed will of God.

This year, Marilyn has the ACLU in her corner; and yesterday, her arguments to end public prayer at Town Meeting were considered by the State Superior Court.

Even though Superior Court Judge Martin Maley has said that a decision will not be handed down before Town Meeting is held this year, Ms. Hackett says she will be attending Town Meeting as usual.  

When asked to issue an injunction prohibiting the Town from including the prayer in this year’s meeting, the Judge declined to do so, giving the excuse that he will be

“out of town…and won’t have the time to decide whether an injunction is necessary.”

As this year’s brand of religious crazy seems to be shifting from Islamist fundamentalism to Christian fundamentalism, and the social agenda of the Republican party sounds like something from the Eisenhower years,  Ms. Hackett has to be especially courageous to hold her ground and even raise the stakes.

Romanticized by the rest of the county, Town Meeting has become the very symbol of direct democracy; but for Marilyn Hackett, it is a painful annual reminder that her views are not respected by her community.

“I will not give up my democratic rights,my civil rights,” he said.  “But it’s a miserable experience.  I go home and cry every year.”

(You can read Marilyn’s own thoughtful and well articulated arguments in my April 15, 2010 post on the subject.)

One of the biggest players in Northeastern broadcasting is about to vanish, a victim of overly aggressive expansion and impatient creditors. And it has big implications for the Vermont radio scene.

A bankruptcy judge has ordered Nassau Broadcasting to auction its 46 radio stations, including 12 in Vermont. And the 12 include some of the biggest stations outside of Burlington. A few names: WORK (“Frank FM”) and WWFY (“Froggy”) in central Vermont, WXLF (“The Wolf”) in the Upper Valley, WMOO (“Moo 92”) in the Northeast Kingdom, and WEXP (“The Fox”) in Rutland. Complete list below.

As is the case with every corporate radio chain, Nassau’s stations feature homogenized formats and syndicated personalities, often spiced up with a local morning show and occasionally a bit more. But very standard, uninspiring stuff; the kind of mass-marketed programming that’s turned radio into the vast wasteland it is today.

(This story comes from the Rutland Herald, whose content is behind a paywall, so I won’t bother including a link. But it was listed on Google News this morning, and if you go through Google News you somehow evade the paywall. Go to Google, click on “News,” and type “Nassau Broadcasting” in the search box.)

After the jump: Big debts, the station list, and a lament for a (mostly) lost medium.

Nassau is a New Jersey-based corporation that expanded aggressively into New England, taking on mountains of debt in the process. It has debts totaling $283.7 million, and its major creditors (Goldman Sachs and others) are forcing bankruptcy and the asset sale. Or, in bankruptcy-filing-ese,

The debtor’s balance sheet reflects far too much secured indebtedness for these businesses and it cannot be sustained; an orderly liquidation process in the form of a proposed sale will, in all likelihood, generate greater recoveries for creditors than a piecemeal liquidation, and no one could fairly argue otherwise.

Bids are due by April 27, with the auction to be held on May 3.

It’d be nice to say that this could open a new day in Vermont broadcasting, with new owners bringing fresh capital and ideas to stale properties. Hell, it’d be nice to say “Anybody want to go in on a radio station?” But the truth is, these stations are almost certain to be shuffled to other corporate chains. Might be a few format changes, but it’ll be more of the same syndicated pap you can hear anywhere in the country.

The lifting of ownership limits in the 80s and 90s by the FCC, and the tidal wave of corporate takeovers that followed, have turned radio into a hollow shell of what it used to be.  

Sigh.

The list:

WORK-FM (Barre) “Frank FM,” Classic rock.

WWFY-FM (Barre) “Froggy,” Country.

WSNO-AM (Barre) Conservative talk. Beck, Rush, etc.

WEXP (Rutland) and WTHK (Wilmington), aka “The Fox.” Country.

WXLF and WZLF (Upper Valley), “The Wolf.” Country.

WWOD and WFYX (Upper Valley), Oldies.

WNHV-AM (Upper Valley), inactive. Formerly ESPN sports talk.

WMOO (Derby), “Moo 92,” Adult Contemporary/Variety.

WIKE-AM (Newport), Country.  

(With apologies to Psalm 146.)

Someone I know lost her job yesterday. Worked for most of her adult life at IBM in New York State. She’s now in her mid-50s, got a month left on the job, then six months of severance pay. (Furloughed workers get one week of pay for every six months of seniority.)

Thank goodness she’ll get her 30 years and qualify for a pension. Some of her colleagues will fall just short, and they’re well and truly screwed. But the pension isn’t nearly enough to live on, so she has to find work. She’s got some good computer skills and a strong work ethic, so her chances are pretty good. But it’s still a real shock, like suddenly stepping into an unseen abyss.  

IBM laid off an unstated number of people yesterday, mostly in white collar jobs, many at its Poughkeepsie headquarters or nearby. The company refuses to give a number, supposedly for competitive reasons — but the real reason, obviously, is that the bastards don’t want the blast of bad publicity that comes with a mass layoff announcement. (There were enough layoffs for IBM to have the police on hand outside its headquarters in case trouble started.)

Alliance@IBM, a union local, is counting layoffs on its own and keeping a running tab on its website. As of this writing, the total is 1202. According to Alliance, IBM’s American workforce has shrunk by 35% in the last seven years, from 134,000 in 2005 to an estimated 98,000 now. (IBM ain’t telling.)

After the jump: I’d call it evil, but it’s really amoral.

In a way, this is a relief for my friend. In recent years, IBM has been ratcheting up the pressure on its staff. Every year, the bottom 10% in her area have been let go. For a while, that meant losing the deadwood, but eventually you’re cutting some pretty damn good workers. And everyone knew that they had to stay out of the bottom range, which meant working harder and harder. And the harder everyone worked, the more it took to stay off the bottom. IBM used to be a really good place to work; now it’s an anxiety-laden anthill.

So where’s the work going? Two places: Developing countries with cheap labor, particularly China, and contracted workers with no consistent hours or pay.

Accompanying the cuts is a blizzard of management doublespeak. From InformationWeek:

An IBM spokesman on Tuesday declined to answer questions about the layoffs, but provided the following statement in an email to InformationWeek: “IBM is constantly rebalancing its workforce. That means reducing in some areas and hiring in others–based on shifts in technology and client demand.

We’re not firing people; we’re simply “rebalancing our workforce.” Guess they really aced that Newspeak course in business school. And here’s a real doozy from North Carolina TV station WRAL concerning the move away from full-time staffing:

“Internally the restructuring has been dubbed ‘Generation Open’ and staff that work for IBM on projects but are not full time are called ‘liquid players,” according to an internal document seen by Reuters.

“Liquid players.” Otherwise known as “people.” People who will have no steady income, no benefits, no regular hours, and absolutely no security. And “Generation Open,” as in “there’s a trap door under your desk.” But hey, you gotta break a few eggs to rebalance a workforce. Back to WRAL:

Big Blue likes to say that it is expanding its overall work force and hiring. True. Numbers are well above 400,000. But what IBM no longer discloses is how many people it employs where. By hiding that fact (it says for competitive reasons), Big Blue escapes harsh criticism about offshoring and outsourcing jobs.

Here in Vermont, there’s constant concern about the health and attitude of IBM. Conservative and business types are constantly pushing the line that we need IBM’s jobs, we need to make them happy. We need fewer regulatory burdens,  we need lower taxes, we need dependable (read: VY nuclear) electric power, we need whatever IBM wants, basically.

Well, maybe. But looking at IBM’s recent history, I must conclude that someday they’re going to say farewell to Vermont. And it won’t have anything to do with the cost of a KwH or the corporate property tax bill or the business-friendliness of state agencies. It will be due to the exigencies of a global corporation running itself on the principles of Ayn Rand. And any amount of bending over backwards won’t change that ugly truth.

If I were doing economic development for Burlington or the state, I’d spend less time catering to a fickle multinational and more time crafting a broad-based economy with a lot of prosperous small businesses.

If I worked for IBM, I’d keep my resume updated.  

Northeast Kingdom Member/Supporter of the Vermont Sierra Club,

    Town Meeting is nearly upon us.  Therefore we would like to ask you to help us spread the word about the Our Forests Our Future campaign.  Can you put out community forest pamphlets at your Town Meeting?  If so, please immediately email me, David Van Deusen, at:

david.vandeusen@sierraclub.org

    The Our Forest Our Future campaign is seeking to create a mosaic of new town and Abenaki forests in Vermont as a means to help build wildlife migration corridors and to make our forests more resilient in the face of climate change.  Our Forests Our Future contends that community forests not only help in the fight against climate change through carbon sequestration, but can also serve the social and economic needs of local people by providing firewood to the poor, local revenue to the community, and jobs to local loggers through sustainable forestry. This is the Vermont Way!

    Over the last year and a half we have made tremendous progress on the Our Forests Our Future campaign.  Together we have made a strong case in favor of establishing new locally owned, conservation oriented, community forests throughout the Kingdom and beyond.  Thus far we have:

* Built a large coalition of Native American Tribes (especially with the NEK Nulhegan Abenaki), organized labor, farmers, and fellow environmentalists.

*Presented a petition to the Governor with well over 1,000 signatures in support of new town forests (and in turn the Governor is proposing a 1.2 million dollar annual increase to the Vermont Housing and Conservation Fund).

*Helped to build the largest environmental rally in the history of Vermont (the Sept. 24th Moving Planet in Montpelier), where Our Forests Our Future took center stage.

*Had Our Forest Our Future op-eds and LTE’s printed in newspapers all around the state.

*And now WE NEED YOU to carry our momentum forward by spreading the word in your community on Town Meeting Day!

    Please help the Vermont Sierra Club and the Nulhegan Abenaki Tribe advance the goals of Our Forests Our Future by agreeing to place campaign pamphlets in your Town Hall on March 6th.  After you email me to say you are willing to help, I will get these in the mail to you immediately so that you can have them in time.

    As always, thank you for your support. With your direct participation, we will win!

David Van Deusen,

Conservation Organizer,

Vermont Sierra Club

David.vandeusen@sierraclub.org

(802)522-5812

Last week, as a result of a FOIA request the NRC made available online transcripts of agency conference calls made during the Fukushima meltdown disaster. Released without much media fanfare, these transcripts may have a pretty limited readership, but it really is fascinating first-hand stuff.

Regardless of your view of nuclear power, the first confused conversations made after the March 11, 2011 tsunami are a little unsettling. We should all be uneasy – not just because of the nuclear crisis unfolding in Japan, horrible enough, but because, as the NY Times suggests:

An undercurrent of the transcripts is how the United States would handle such an event.

Part of that dark undercurrent is the snail’s pace the NRC Fukushima Task Force’s recommendations are moving at. The earliest of Chairman Jaczko’s “fast-tracked” recommendations are still five years away from implementation. The remaining changes face many years of lengthy review and a generous helping of ‘stakeholder’ (industry) input before NRC final approval .  

The following excerpt is part of a call from Dan (Dan Dorman, Deputy Director for Engineering and Corporate Support) who is calling and wakes up Mr. Mamish (Nader L. Mamish, NRC Assistant for Operations). Included briefly is a Ms Doan (who may be Margaret Doan, Director, Office of International Programs.

The call took place early Saturday morning March 12, 2011.

DAN: So, have you gotten any sleep?

MR. MAMISH: I came home, ate and just crashed, had a couple of beers and crashed, right away. So, I just woke up.

DAN: You fit for duty?

MR. MAMISH: What?

Continued after the jump … “are you fit for duty”

DAN: Are you fit for duty? You're recorded live.

MR. MAMISH: Just a couple [beers], come on, Dan, give me a break.

DAN: All right.

MR. MAMISH: So, do we know anything about the rad level?

DAN: We have no specifics.

MR. MAMISH: Okay.

MS. DOANE: Hey, Dan. We were talking, TMI, maybe a refresher would be good for some of us.

DAN: Yes, okay.  

The second conference call is also from March 12.This, in part, is an exchange between NRC Chairman Jaczko and Dan Dorman (click here for the NRC transcript PDF).  

CHAIRMAN JACZKO: Okay.  

MR. DORMAN: Sir, a quick synopsis of the message that was sent from Mr. Condo to Mr. Poneman.  The issue is that Unit 1 at Daiichi, this is the unit that's similar to Oyster Creek, the isolation condenser plant.

CHAIRMAN JACZKO: Yes.  

MR. DORMAN: Based on the information in the email, it's evident that there is core damage at that facility, and that they are very recently in the process of venting the containment, and the — it makes mention of the wind direction, blowing to sea, that they are — do not have any at the plant, injection and cooling systems available, because of the loss of power. But they are using anything that they can find, in terms of fire trucks and perhaps, batteries from vehicles, to power pumps, to get water into the core.

‘Undercurrent’? More like an undertow.

So this Dave Gram AP piece featured in The Brattleboro Reformer was unexpected:

The company that owns the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant said Monday night it would appeal a federal judge’s order allowing the plant to stay open past its originally scheduled shutdown date, and asked the original judge to revisit his order and prevent the state from barring the future storage of spent nuclear fuel at the Vernon reactor.

Yes, you got that right.  Entergy is, in fact, appealing the decision that allowed them to stay open.  Why?  Because they not only want the right to stay open.  They want the right to stay open without state oversight of their fuel storage practices.

Any day now, I expect that we will discover that they have, as Mr. Smithers from The Simpsons put it “…crossed that line between everyday villainy and cartoonish super-villainy.”  Regulators will show up, and there will be a defense grid, consisting of an electric fence, a moat and sharks with friggin laser beams.  Oh, and they’ll have installed a Kraken in the Connecticut River to guard the plant from other access points.

Of course, as long as they’ve got enough minions lawyers doing their bidding, they may never need the moat.

Vermont’s Presidential primary looks to be passing by like a thief in the night. The voting is eight days away, and there’s been a lot more attention paid to the Burlington mayoral race than to the Romney/Santorum/Paul/Gingrich clusterf– er, contest. None of the Republican candidates are bothering to stick their noses into the state — not even for a quick speech in a Burlington Airport hangar, a la Dick Cheney.

But hey, we’ve got some actual primary news! The Castleton Polling Institute has released its first poll of the 2012 Presidential campaign. Phone survey of 800 “likely voters,” conducted between 2/11 and 2/22, margin of error plus/minus 3.5%.

The topline in Castleton’s press release: Mitt Romney is the favorite in the Vermont primary. The topline, as far as I’m concerned, is the narrowness of his lead. Romney has 34%, Rick “Santorum” Santorum 27%, Ron Paul 14%, and Newt Gingrich 10%. (By my math, that leaves 15% either undecided or supporting others. Seems like a high number so close to primary day.)

After the jump: Support both firm and frothy, Obama landslide in the works, and broad support for a campaign-finance constitutional amendment.

The survey does contain a bit more good news for Romney:

Romney’s support is firmer, with 55 percent of Santorum supporters saying that they are either somewhat or very likely to change their minds before election day.

If Romney’s support is firmer, is it fair to say that Santorum’s is frothier? Sorry, couldn’t resist. Anyway, that is a sign that Romney can hope for a wider margin of victory next Tuesday.

But still. Vermont’s Republican electorate leans heavily toward fiscal conservatism, which is Romney’s wheelhouse. There’s not much in the way of Religious Right or even Tea Party influence. (Indeed, the survey says that only 7% of Republicans surveyed consider themselves to be “very conservative.”) And Romney’s only up by seven percent?

Am I alone in thinking that’s a pathetic showing for Mitt? I’d expect him to be skunking this field in Vermont by 15-20 points.  But of course, this is perfectly in line with his performance to date in the primary season: considering the “quality” of his opposition and the resources at his command, he should be marching triumphantly to the Convention instead of having to kick, bite and scratch for every delegate.

Other tidbits from the Castleton poll:

As far as Vermont’s electoral votes are concerned, it doesn’t matter who wins the nomination; he’ll be obliterated by Obama in November. Obama beats Romney by 26, Santorum by 28, Paul by 30, and Newt by 42. (A moment of schadenfreude, if you please, for the selt-described Defender of Civilization who is now far less electable in Vermont than Ron Paul.)

76% of Vermont voters favor a constitutional amendment to limit campaign spending — including 57% of Vermont Republicans.

58% of those surveyed are in favor of four-year terms for Governor.

So there you go. The first, and possibly last, GMD diary on the Vermont primary. You may now go back to ignoring the whole thing.  

Cheery little article on Vermont Digger, sure to add a little sugar to your coffee, with more evidence that our climate is, indeed, changing. The story has a soft open, about prospects for this year’s maple syrup run; then it summarizes two pieces of tangible, real-life news about our changing climate.

The first: Maple sugaring season is coming earlier and earlier, according to Tim Perkins at the Proctor Maple Research Center.

Perkins cited research that showed that sugar maple trees now release their sap approximately 8.2 days earlier and stop producing usable sap 11.4 days earlier than they did 40 years ago. This translates to an approximate 10 percent loss in the duration of the season.

And item number two, from the genteel world of gardening:

The USDA recently released an updated 2012 Plant Hardiness Zone Map that guides gardeners by mapping the country by zones, which reflects the average annual extreme minimum temperatures from 1976-2005. …Much of Chittenden County jumped up a half of a zone as compared to the 1990 map; a potential leap of 5 degrees Fahrenheit.

After the jump: Science… or Anarcho-Syndicalist Al Qaeda New Black Panther Ivory Tower plot?

These aren’t projections from giacial ice data, or theoretical musings from egghead academics, or bumpersticker ravings of the Green Party. These are simple, measurable matters of fact with direct, tangible effects on the way we live. They are also two more pieces of solid evidence to add to the impressive mountain of evidence collected by the scientific community. Or at least those members of the scientific community who haven’t sold their souls to the Koch Brothers.

On the other hand… when you take a closer look at the VTDigger story, you see that the Proctor Maple Research Center is part of the University of Vermont. And the story itself was written by a UVM graduate student.

Well, never mind, then. Both studies are obviously tainted by their association with a university. And as Rick Santorum will tell you, our colleges and universities are hotbeds of Commie/Islamo/Environmentalism. And humanism. Therefore, any product of the higher-education system is guilty by association. Never mind, folks; keep on pumping those greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.