Once again the best interests of the people of Vermont are on schedule to be derailed by the deep pockets of business.   It’s such a familiar story that it almost slips by unnoticed.

According to the Free Press, on the last day of the legislative session, language that was inserted into the budget bill to give the public a voice in the enforcement phase of ANR jurisdiction will be removed so as to not delay the end of the session.

The last-minute measure would have allowed public input on environmental enforcement cases, bringing the state partially into compliance with U.S. Environmental Protection Agency rules. Without it, the state risks losing $1.55 million in EPA funding, Agency of Natural Resources Deputy Secretary Chris Recchia told senators.

Nice.  So, not only are we once again left voiceless in a critical process, but we will essentially be taxed $1.55 million for that dis-privilege.  

Louis Porter of the Conservation Law Foundation said it best:

“The question here is whether we provide the public their right to participate in state-initiated environmental enforcement, or whether we protect polluters,”

Like it or not, the ANR essentially receives its marching orders from whoever happens to be the governor at the moment.  Right now, we’re pretty happy with how that worked out, but over the past eight years environmental activists have been in agony watching enforcement fail under the Douglas administration.  

This is why it is so essential that public input has a structural role in the enforcement process.  The EPA recognizes that need, why doesn’t a progressive state like Vermont?

Open government? Not so much.

Representing the views of business, I suppose, the Freeps quotes William Driscoll , vice-president of Associated Industries of Vermont:

“It creates greater uncertainty about how rules are going to be enforced,” he said. “Businesses like to know the rules.”

This seems somewhat disingenuous, as if the “rules” provide no more than an arbitrary yardstick.  The subtext is that businesses count on being able to “work” the ANR so that they can be seen as officially compliant even while falling short of strict adherence to the rules; and they can induce a benign culture in which penalties represent no more than a slap on the wrist.  

Introducing into the enforcement process the higher expectations of those who must live with the consequences of non-compliance will inevitably disrupt this deliberate calculus.

So add this local development to the growing body of evidence that individuals are becoming less than equal to corporations in post-Citizens-United America.  You, too, will soon know what it means to be a second-class citizen.

The latest from Mr. Class, Rob Williams, and the “racism, what racism?!?” cabal at Vermont Commons takes either real kahunas or a true disassociation from reality. In mocking Barack Obama, he’s taken to embracing the openly racist imagery of the Tea Party that has been roundly criticized by African Americans and, well… decent people of all political persuasions.

The picture on the left has been in circulation for some time, and it’s now Williams’s fave, as seen here and here, where he celebrates it with the comment “Barack Osama –> ain’t Photoshop great?”

It neatly and tidily combines all the scary non-whiteness into one, nice package with the President’s face. The Root, a WaPo publication focused on African American Issues, describes this particular image in its piece entitled “Evolving Images of Obama and Osama” as an “attempt to mobilize bigotry and fears about terrorism, Islam and bin Laden to delegitimize Obama as an American, a patriot and a president.”

This is the latest from the crowd that’s so above racism, they feel free to dub a hate group figure as their “philosophical guru,”, unapologetically publish League of the South leaders online and in print, has never apologized for publishing the writings of a neo-nazi sympathizer who warned Vermonters of the threat of “multiculturalists, feminists, gays, environmentalists, internationalists, secularists, and Holocaust promoters” (get it?) on the pages of their periodical (but quietly scrubbed it from the website when called on it), monthly post rants by a man who has no problem promoting his cause with leading figures in the racist movement or on talk shows affiliated with neo-confederate racists, who casually and routinely collaborate with racist organizations (including for the purposes of sharing and refining propaganda tactics), and who’ve even had the gall to invite them all up here to dirty up our own Vermont Statehouse. Par for the course.

And don’t look for any help from their enablers. Otherwise progressive folks like Will Lindner and Carl Etnier have no problem being associated – even promoting – this stuff. I guess it’s “none of their damn business” if their names could easily appear alongside the likes of neo-nazi sympathizer Robert Griffin, or that their reputations could be being put in the service of legitimizing calls for segregation in a new “Vermont Republic.”

Nor should we expect any worries from organizations like the Vermont Natural Resources Council, Rural Vermont, or businesses like Northshire Books and Marlboro College who allow their ads to appear alongside these pieces in print. What do environmentalists, farmers and… er… readers (I guess) care about racism after all? And Rob is just sooo sweet! Of course, not that they’re paying for those ads – Williams simply hands them out from “anonymous” donors so that mainstream and legitimate businesses and organizations will attach their names to his operation and shield him from criticism.

Yuck. I feel like I need a shower every time this topic comes up.

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Framing the release of OBL's death photos is interesting.  Sarah Palin thinks it would be a great way to swing our mighty dicks.  President Obama suggests it would be like spiking the football or showing off a trophy.  They're both wrong: we already did the former by violating an ally's sovereignty to assassinate somebody; keeping, say…Saddam's pistol to fondle qualifies for the latter, forensic evidence does not.

All that chaff obscures reality.  This is at heart an issue of government transparency.  

Our government, in our name, killed our #1 enemy.  Hiding pictures of the result is the same as hiding pictures of the price when our troops' come home in transfer tubes.  While our political rhetoric is oft childish, we are not children and need not be shielded from gruesome reality.

No, we must as ultimate sovereigns have all the reality we can possibly ingest as we make life or death decisions.  Certainly we don't do that on a daily basis, but we select the proxies who lay down policy in service to our interests and the impact–costs and benefits–of those decisions has to be felt in a democratic republic such as ours.

Beyond having an informed electorate, this is about our government's default posture.  I do not advocate live tweeting details of an operation as it happens, but we should err on the side of openness, particularly after the fact.  Otherwise you head down the slippery slope of government justification for hiding information that doesn't threaten our collective security at all, but rather threatens the security of those in power.  That is anathema to a government of, by and for the people.

As I've said elsewhere, I appreciate the sensitivies involved and could see waiting a while to allow passions to cool before releasing the photos.  That said, I think those who would be incited are already, so keeping pictures from public view accomplishes nothing in the end, and merely erects another barrier between the people and their government and policies executed in their name.

ntodd

[Update: a little more at my blog.] 

(This discussion began in the comments on an unrelated thread and I think it deserves a stand-alone place in our front-page conversation – promoted by Sue Prent)

Vermonters for a Clean Environment has been looking into the composition of the Natural Resources Board, which consists of the Natural Resources Panel and the Water Resources Panel, and the various District Commissions – the bureaucracy that runs the Act 250 process.  These are the people who hear Act 250 permit applications, and interact with citizens and businesses on a daily basis to (theoretically) ensure that Vermont’s values of environmental protection and citizen involvement are protected.

What we have found is troubling.  Of the 14 Board/Panel members for example, 7 are unconfirmed Douglas appointees (including the Vice Chair), and there are 2 vacancies.  Only 5 of 14 have been confirmed by the Senate. Governor Douglas made several of his appointments just before leaving office, selections that included a retiring Republican legislator and a former member of his cabinet.

Mention the confirmation of gubernatorial appointees and many Vermonters will remember the 1994 confirmation process that threw three of Vermont’s best environmentalists, Elizabeth Courtney, Terry Ehrich, and Nundy Bongartz, off the Environmental Board.  Then-Governor Howard Dean did not defend his appointees.  Now we have a new Democrat as Governor who has been treated to a parting gift by Governor Douglas.  Some of these seats are four year terms, so the NRB as it currently exists will be carrying out the policies of the Douglas administration – for example to see businesses, not the environment, as the “customer” served by the permitting process – unless action is taken, and soon.  Under Douglas, the “do-nothing” NRB chose not to intervene in Environmental Court cases to defend its permits or rules.

The Senate Natural Resources Committee is the committee of jurisdiction charged with confirming NRB appointees.  Yesterday the Administration sent the Committee Chair an email stating that they fully support the Douglas Administration’s appointments, to these and other positions throughout state government.

This isn’t about partisan politics or playing favorites, it’s about policy differences.  Does Governor Shumlin care enough about the environment to make a clear distinction between the land use philosophy and policies of his Administration and the one that preceded his?  Apparently not.

You can find more about this issue, including background documents, at http://vermontersforacleanenvi…

I’m putting this up as a diary just because it’s an opportunity to again demonstrate that we disagree a lot on this site, and there is no GMD party line. I think that’s one of the things that makes this site cooler than the other dKos style sites.

While I agree with everything Jack says below, there is an overriding principle that he does not address: government transparency and the way we treat public documents.

As a matter of principle, I have always believed that all government documents and records should be open and accessible unless they impact some sort of operational integrity (of an operation underway, not one recently wrapped) or unreasonably impact personal privacy. Neither is the case here. That’s not to say that Jack’s points aren’t valid, but it’s the responsibility of government to protect our rights and protect our safety, even though doing both is always harder than picking one over the other.

If our principles of open government are to have any meaning, they have to apply even when it’s uncomfortable. Otherwise, we are essentially saying we’re all for open government records, unless we need to withhold them for the public’s own good.

That argument simply brings us full circle, leaving the concept of “our own good” to whoever is in power, and whoever supports them in power. And that’s not open government at all.

We know now that President Obama has decided not to release the photographs of Osama bin Laden, and I think he made the right decision.

It's tempting to say that it's the right decision just because former half-term Alsaka governor Sarah Palin thinks it isn't, but there are better reasons than that.

My thoughts: 1. People already know we've killed him. Showing the pictures will make him more of a martyr than they already consider him.

2. Releasing the photos won't convince anybody. The people who don't believe bin Laden was killed Sunday are the same ones who have looked at a million copies of Obama's official birth certificate and decided it was a fake, while concluding that an obvious forgery was his actual birth certificate from Kenya. What are the odds they won't claim that any bin Laden death photos aren't faked?

3. This isn't like Abu Ghraib; the disclosure of those photos was needed to tell the truth to the American people and the world. Here there is no good-faith question of what happened, nothing to prove.

4. We're better than that. Civilized people are rightly repelled by the barbaric display of the heads of vanquished enemies. We have the opportunity to rise above the baser voices calling for a bloodthirsty display of the corpse of a man who amply deserved his fate. We don't display body trophies.

By way of dKos, this is weird. Here’s the Dalai Lama talking about the killing of Osama bin Laden:

in an appearance Tuesday at USC, he appeared to suggest that the United States was justified in killing Osama bin Laden.

[…] “Forgiveness doesn’t mean forget what happened. … If something is serious and it is necessary to take counter-measures, you have to take counter-measures.”

Here’s a line emerging from Fox News. This is Andrew Napolitano from his wing-nut “news” show:

This business of the president deciding to kill people is very dangerous and very unlawful. Put aside that governmental assassination is a violation of the Constitution. Put aside that this killing was not in self-defense and was without a declaration of war. Put aside the law that the president may never order the killing of civilians-period. And put aside that governmental killing violates at least four treaties and three federal statutes.

Fox News is now concerned about treaties, and killing people, and the Dalai Lama thinks it’s not so bad, and… and… whoa, I’m getting dizzy.

It was forty-one years ago today that the Ohio National Guard murdered four students at Kent State University for the crime of disagreeing with what we were told was government “of the people, by the people, for the people.”

Despite years of coverups and denials, the Cleveland Plain Dealer is continuing to investigate the massacre at Kent State, and making progress. In part those investigations have centered on tape recordings of the events.

Here's a link to one recent article: KENT, Ohio — In the four decades since Ohio National Guardsmen fired on students and antiwar demonstrators at Kent State University, Terry Norman has remained a central but shadowy figure in the tragedy.

Despite numerous claims to self-defense, there has been no credible evidence presented that the National Guard contingent was in serious danger.

As paltry as the spending cuts made with the recent federal budget compromise may have been when looking at the overall national budget deficit, there is an area that was hit that could mean grave circumstances for the near future. The target in discussion is the budget of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The proposed budget cuts managed to eliminate around 16% or roughly around $1.6 billion. While this has yet to touch on any of the serious health related issues such as the monitoring of water contamination, and the Clean Air Act, many GOP representatives see the EPA as a force stifling business profits and raising the already climbing gas prices, and could use these arguments to continue combating EPA regulations and initiatives.

The GOP’s conscious effort to stifle EPA resources met success in 2011, and may result in exploration of further cuts into the 2012 year. Looking at The EPA’s contribution to cutting down on environmentally related health problems each year, a cut to the EPA budget could result in an increase of health related issues.

Gas prices may be rising, and job growth may be at record lows, but the health risks of an EPA budget cut is something that is not to be viewed lightly. If budget cuts are to continue, air quality, and pollution would certainly compliment a spike in health dangers like asthma and mesothelioma. This is not a light issue when lived are potentially at stake. For instance, the mesothelioma life expectancy averages at about 14 months after diagnosis. The EPA has even made note that 160,000 cases of premature deaths, 130,000 heart attacks, 1.7 million asthma attacks, and 13 million lost work days have been prevented by the initiatives like the Clean Air Act.

It’s important to consider the realistic possibility that many businesses losing money will continue to push harmful contaminants in the air if EPA emission regulations aren’t enforced. When it comes to federal budget cuts, they should be calculated and enacted with the population of the country when all is said and done. Cutting the EPA budget has certainly sparked debate with two sides with valid points. However, while reduction of gas prices and a stimulated job market may seem great, in the long term health risk associated with pollutants, toxins, and chemicals is another story.