It was a shock when I was flipping through Tuesday’s Free Press looking for the comics and the crossword puzzle and stumbled over a photo of someone I knew who was in his 40s on the obit page.

In the last couple of years Tom Belrose worked with VPIRG, the Vermont Democratic Party, and Vermont Freedom to Marry. I met him when he became the VDP field organizer for Franklin County and worked with him often over the election season from August to November last year. I pointed him at Vermont Freedom to Marry when he was looking for a job last spring, and he became the Franklin-Lamoille Field Organizer working to get marriage equality through the legislature and enough support for representatives to vote to override the governor’s veto. He was a persistent and dogged worker, nearly always cheerful, always trying to help.

The car accident in which he died was a head-on collision on narrow two-lane road near the Montgomery-Belvidere town lines, and Tom was pronounced dead at the scene (he drove an old Jetta, I think, pre-airbag). The other driver is still in the hospital, with ‘non-life-threatening injuries.’

He bought me a beer a couple of weeks ago at our Franklin County “First Friday” liberal bar gathering, which is the last time I saw him. When I last talked to him on the phone, he was worrying about whether Franklin County employers were not calling him back because of the Freedom to Marry work on his resume – which, as a straight man, he did because he believed in social justice for everyone.

He also smoked like a chimney, greeted nearly everyone with “How we doin’ today?”, was perpetually running behind schedule, and was wont to make erroneous declarations of ‘fact’ on some subjects, although if presented with actual facts would admit he might not know as much as he thought he did.

And he was a good guy with a good heart and a dedication to spending what turned out to be 44 years making this corner of the world a better place to live in.

His wake and funeral are Friday Sept. 25 in Swanton at the Kidder Funeral Home, with visiting hours starting at 1 pm immediately followed at 3 pm with funeral services and interment.

Hug your families, call your friends: we never know when our time is up.

His family has requested that in lieu of flowers, those who wish to commemorate Tom’s life donate to a college fund for his daughter, Leah Michelle Belrose, c/o Michelle Hubbell, P.O. Box 71, Johnson, VT 05656. 

“We continue to emphasize that America does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements (in the West Bank),” [President Obama] said in a maiden speech to the 192-member body.

(Continued Israeli settlements in West Bank not legitimate: Obama, Raw Story, 09/23/09)

(cross-posted from Integralpsychosis.com)

I have two separate but equally effective proposals to make that will drastically and surely make Vermont a much, much better place for all of us.  OK, not for all of us, ’cause there are a handful of people that gain from the backwards, nonsensical world that Governor Douglas and his corporate stooges have built and continue to weasel us towards.  These status-quo capitalists, as many of us are now familiar, have a simple program of claiming corporate greed and profiteering as “freedom” and simultaneously decrying the collective action of the people to take care of ourselves- for ourselves as well as our most vulnerable and downtrodden neighbors- as anti-freedom, socialistic (which somehow means “bad”) coming-of-the-anti-christ evil.  But for the vast majority of us, these two suggestions would be net positives.  As a result of my first proposal, farming on the scale that fits the Vermont landscape and social climate (i.e., relatively “small scale” farming, at least as compared to the big ag of the Midwest and California) would be a sustainable enterprise, as far and the financial field of view is concerned.  Dairy farms would no longer be servants to out of control processing conglomerates who make record profits while the farms who supply their milk fold or file for bankruptcy at the steady pace of ‘taps’ on the funeral drum.  As a result of my second proposal, the social services and safety net which takes care of our most needy friends and family, which as well provides and nurtures a great many of the finer aspects of life in Vermont which we’ve come to enjoy (not to mention the ordinary aspects of life, like going to the DMV), would be not only saved from the pillaging efforts of the Douglas Administration, but would possibly even thrive and grow to be better, more efficient, and more outstanding.

My first suggestion is for the diary farmers of Vermont to dump obscene quantities of milk into Lake champlain.  Seriously.  French dairy farmers, facing conditions quite similar to Vermont dairy farmers, recently decided to dump obscene amounts of milk into a well-known, public and touristy waterway, and not only did their action garner international attention (I read about it in the Times-Argus) but I’d be willing to bet that it helps lead to a resolution of their grievance.  Elsewhere in France, as well as in the Netherlands and Germany, dairy farmers have been on strike- refusing to deliver their milk- in protest of the low amount they’re being paid (bellow the cost of production) and while some have chosen to collectively dump their milk (cows have to be milked, whether you’re on strike or not) in high-profile places, others still throughout Europe have been donating their milk to neighbors and the needy, while yet others have taken the direct action of raiding grocery stores and giving their product away free to shoppers.

And I promise that if Vermont’s dairy farmers did the same, their woes (and ours, in fact) would be largely over.

OK, these actions won’t end all of society’s ills.  But between mega-conglomerate producers like Dean Foods and the political elites who must put the best face of “taking care of the little guy” forward in order to keep their jobs, to the myriad of economic interests wrapped-up in not only dairy farming but agriculture in general, I assure you that the powers that be will act quickly to ensure that Vermont dairy farmers get whatever it is they demand in order to stop dumping (or giving away for free) their milk.  This will greatly effect the rest of us (who don’t milk cows for a living): for starters, the continued existence of dairy farmers throughout Vermont ensures the survival of open space and preservation of our majestic hillsides and valleys.  The environment (and “environmentalists”, who I guess are defined as people who like having a clean, healthy place to live) would obviously benefit as the micro-ecological zones of Vermont would continue to allow for an abundance of wildlife both big and small to flourish free of the cancer of mindless development.  This, of course, effects our incredibly important (like it or not) (and I don’t) tourist industry and the billions of dollars which we live off because people from somewhere else want to see our wilderness and farm-scapes and rolling hills, etc.  Which, of course, keeps many of us employed in restaurants and hotels, and ski resorts and building condos, etc, etc.  Plus, the rest of the Vermont farming community (who aren’t in the traditional dairy business) would be expected to be inspired, excited by the power of the diary farmer’s victory and perhaps even begin taking collective action for their needs and conditions- suddenly the whole State could be in an uproar about food security and availability and affordability and sustainability!  It would be Scott Nearing’s goddamn utopia around here!

A bit more seriously though, the economic as well as social interests in Vermont which would not be willing to stand for such bad PR- to say nothing of the heated political climate- would act quickly to ensure, in whatever way they can, that our dairy farmers get paid a fair, livable wage for their milk.  Everyone, except for the processing conglomerates and the political hacks like Douglas who support their free-market hubaloo, would win.

My second proposal is for the State employees to go on strike.  Immediately.  Wildcat if necessary (a “wildcat strike”, if you don’t know, is a strike either by workers who don’t have a recognized union, or who individually or as a group chose to go on strike without perhaps the formalistic, legalized steps typically required for unions to go on strike).  I’m very serious here.  If you or your mate or one of your friends or family members work for the State of Vermont, please either consider or talk to them about considering going on strike as soon as humanly possible.  Obviously, if just one or two or ten people do it, not much is gonna happen except you’re quite likely to lose your job.  But if dozens, if hundreds or even more of you (they) do it, I’m certain big things would happen.  And I mean good big things.

Douglas and his worldview want to dismantle as much of the State’s services as possible, to leave the welfare of society out to bid to corporate interests that do a shitty job and which hoard obscene amounts of money into the pockets of their bosses and shareholders.  Listen, I don’t prefer that the State be our savior or our nanny- far, far from it actually- but the State is, at the least- a far more progressive entity than private, capitalist enterprise.  While private corporations are by definition the exploitation of most by and for the profit of the few, the liberal democratic State is, at the very least, an entity intended to bring about the betterment and survival of the collective whole.  The State has no CEO’s to pay, and no profit margin to push.  It seeks only the efficiant delivery of the services demanded of it by the public.

Personally, I would prefer to see neither the private corporation nor the State, but that’s for a different discussion.

In the meantime, the State of Vermont exists for what should be very basic reasons: namely, to provide for the collective good of all of ourselves.  When I’m down and need help I hope that society is there for me, and when I’m not, I hope that my success can provide for the help of someone else who may be down and in need.

And it is the workers of the State, from DMV clerks to IT specialists to Tax Department receptionists and welfare case workers and Health Department inspectors to do just that.  And if none of them (you) showed up for work tomorrow or next Monday, and even if you returned to work Tuesday (though better yet if you didn’t) you would immediately demonstrate the massively disproportionate amount of power that you hold over the Governor or any other politician or political entity which is looking to take your job.

Douglas is insisting on layoffs- so give it to him.  Let him, and the Vermont GOP and the Legislature and the powers that be and the political elite all see what life is like when every single State office, every single State phone, is dead.  No one at the desk, no one answering the phone.  No one processing the application.  If that’s the direction their “free market” ideology wants to take them, let it.  Let everyone in Vermont know the difference between you showing up to work- or having a job to even show up to!- and not.  Every politician from North Hero to Marlboro will be running in front of a camera to declare they’re on your side and want to ensure the security of your job.

And it’s that simple.  Farmers: dump your milk.  State workers: go on strike.  Both of these things, now.  And Vermont will continue to be a place of strong, rural agricultural traditions where our food is from here and our farmers are the anchors of our communities and their open lands provide for the economic as well and ecological and spiritual (for lack of a better word) fulfillment of ourselves and our neighbors; and Vermont will continue to be a place of increasing good will and social strength amongst peoples who come together for their own individual prosperity as well as that of their neighbors and community, especially the sick, the elderly, the disabled, the down-on-their-luck.

Here come the state job cuts – again. Needlessly.

The State Employees Union has been twisting itself into pretzels to find alternatives to cuts, coming up with creative ideas to spread the pain among members. VSEA came to the table offering 4 furlough days, 3 unpaid holidays and use to medical plan surpluses to plug the $7.4 million hole. Putting the lie to Douglas’s claim that the Union refused to look at longer term cost savings, the VSEA even offered to eliminate the dental plan, wellness program and tuition reimbursements for more than $5 million in savings for the next 2 fiscal years. These proposals actually exceeded Joint Fiscal’s “workforce reduction” goals. This is astonishing compromise.

But Jim Douglas is doing what he always does. Digging in on a predetermined, ideological agenda (slash jobs, quash the union, erode government services with an eye towards killing them off entirely), refusing to give an inch as his “opponents” (no, he does not look at anybody else as a “negotiating partner”) meet him 50, 60, 70% of the way. He sticks to his agenda and takes to the press to denounce how unreasonable the other side was and how intractable they were, forcing him to do what he always intended to do from the outset.

It’s sleazy. Dishonorable. Especially when dealing with real peoples’ lives. Apparently to Jim Douglas, state workers’ humanity begins and ends with their Union cards.

I’ve received a couple responses on this. One of them solid, another – good, but a bit concerning.  

From the combined press release out of the Speaker’s and Senate President Pro Tem’s offices:

We are gravely concerned that the impending layoffs of up to 300 state employees could have a devastating effect on state services. We will work with the Union and the Administration to lessen the impact that these layoffs could have on Vermonters.

“Lessen(ing) the impact” sounds dangerously close to rolling over, given that the new law requires Joint Fiscal to sign off on large scale job cuts. This game’s not over – or at least it shouldn’t be.

From a few miles up the road, the Racine campaign had this to say:

Putting more people in the unemployment line cannot help our economy, and cutting services when Vermonters need them most makes absolutely no sense. State employees were willing to make sacrifices, but the governor failed to negotiate a settlement which means more Vermont workers will be out on the street.

Let’s be clear. If the Administration wanted a deal, they could have had one. They kept changing the rules. It didn’t have to be this way.

And it doesn’t have to – yet.

UPDATE: Dan Barlow is all over this story like white on rice in today’s Times Argus.

Money quotes include:

“That is not what we would recommend,” Moulton-Powden said, when asked about Salmon’s idea. “We think that is too deep of a cut.”

AND:

When asked if he believes that an average Vermonter could live off of $300 a week, Salmon said “no.” But he quickly added that unemployment checks should not be seen as a form of income, but a “lifeline to the next job.”

If you’ve ever been unemployed, you know it’s no picnic. You lose your health insurance, you lose a reason to get up and get out in the morning, and, most of all, you lose most of your income. In Vermont, unemployment benefits, to oversimplify just a little, are 50% of your previous wages, up to a maximum of $425.00 a week. Obviously you can see that if you lost a job that paid you $850, $900, or even $1,000 a week, and suddenly you have to survive on $425, you’re in big trouble. Like trying to figure out whether to pay the house payment or the car payment trouble.

This afternoon Tom Salmon, who, at a minimum, has internalized the values of his new party masters, attended the summer study committee meeting  to evaluate mechanisms to improve the stability of Vermont’s unemployment trust fund, and he talked about benefit levels.

Although he didn’t testify, on his way out he said that not right now, but maybe in a year or so, it might be a good idea to save money by cutting the maximum unemployment benefit from $425 a week down to, oh, $300 a week.*

$300 a week to pay your rent, buy all your groceries, keep your utilities on, keep your car on the road, buy clothes for the kids. $300 a week.

I wasn’t there, but I’m told this didn’t go over that well even among the Republicans on the committee.

Is this the new convert, holier than the Pope phenomenon we’re seeing, or has he just lost it?

It’s almost getting to the point where we have to hope he does run for statewide office, isn’t it?

Oh yeah, one other thing. When every other state employee paid more than  $60,000 was taking a pay cut, Salmon was the only one who didn’t, right?  

*CORRECTION: GMD had earlier heard that Salmon had testified at the hearing. The diary has been corrected to reflect that his statement was not in the context of formal testimony to the committee.

Skeeter Sanders has had quite a bit of success posting on DailyKos and has recently started posting here at Green Mountain Daily. He’s been publishing The ‘Skeeter Bites Report since the end of ’05 and central VTers may also know him as the DJ of The Quiet Storm on 91.1 WGDR-FM.

We taped the day after Obama’s health care address, so we both had Joe Wilson on the brain. This clip begins as Skeeter is finishing up enumerated other less publicized instances of Republican boorishness during the presentation to both Houses. Then the discussion broadens:

I found Skeeter’s referencing of 1964 particularly fascinating, perhaps since I had just finished reading Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland.  The book traces both Nixon and the Republican Party’s journey from the political graveyard in 1964 to Nixon’s 1972 landslide. The undoing of the liberal consensus in the intervening years was in part stoked by larger events (Vietnam, urban riots) but Nixon had a large role in orchestrating a politics of division that remains today. Perlstein argues that Nixonland (Southern Strategy, the appeals to emotional and cultural discontents, the politics of resentment) defined the blue state/red state divide that became a cultural shorthand in this decade.

A prerequisite for the flipping of a liberal consensus to decades of a Republican White House (with interludes for Southern Democratic centrists) was the ideologically purifying campaign of Goldwater in 1964. What at the time was political suicide– a hard tack to the right during a liberal era– ended up creating just the contrasts necessary to capitalize on the collapse of that liberal era.

So at the risk of forwarding tortured historical analogies, is the present Republican public hissy fit a kind of purifying ritual that will reap them rewards in the future? Or are we witnessing something quite different, a wholesale shrinkage of a party that will have no claim to vast swaths of the electorate save religious regional voters?

Further, ideological purification as a prescription for a party out of power does not seem to ever be followed by the Democrats. The Democratic Party has not embraced its left flank in my lifetime although many a progressive has insisted that the key to success is to rhetorically and legislatively practice class politics and win the great majority of Americans who are not members of the overclass. When Rove was delusionally declaring a permanent Republican majority in 2004, it was a moment like 1964, where it appeared that the party out of power had been reduced to irrelevancy. The Democrats did not take that moment as a signal to ideologically purify; rather they enlarged the electorate and placed their bets with a biracial conciliator, a man who frequently evoked the other President from Illinois tasked with reuniting and healing a nation. They chose someone who is gifted in minimizing, as opposed to highlighting, contrasts.

But perhaps Perlstein’s formulation is for an era that has ended. He wrote Nixonland in 2008 and perhaps the election of Obama signalled that “there are no red states there are no blue states” anymore. Maybe the present ideological purification, this hard tack to the right we are witnessing as Republican madness, will result in further marginalization.  

Skeeter pointed out that when Bush lost his own party around immigration reform, it should have been an early warning sign of the extremism to follow. What we are seeing is an exorcism of Bush– with the party base refashioning itself hypocritically as deficit hawk America firsters. Maybe what we are witnessing this time is not the ideological purification of 1964, but the complete inability to compute the reality of a black President, resulting in a mass psychological breakdown.

These bills that are rushed through to score cheap political points (such as the condemnation of MoveOn.org for the “Betray-us” ad) are always lousy pieces of legislation. Not only are they often (as in the ACORN and MoveOn bills’ cases) rotten in conception, their actual texts are generally schlocked out hack jobs.

But sometimes, stupid bills can have unexpected consequences. From HuffPo:

The congressional legislation intended to defund ACORN, passed with broad bipartisan support, is written so broadly that it applies to “any organization” that has been charged with breaking federal or state election laws, lobbying disclosure laws, campaign finance laws or filing fraudulent paperwork with any federal or state agency. It also applies to any of the employees, contractors or other folks affiliated with a group charged with any of those things.

In other words, the bill could plausibly defund the entire military-industrial complex. Whoops.

Laugh? Cheer? Put your head in your hands? All of these?

Damn, but Washington makes me proud sometimes.

How can we stay at 37, (or even work our way to 40!) . . .

. . . if we don’t even take care of the most vulnerable and deserving among us? You know we need to protect . . .

. . the health insurance executives.  

Washington County People’s Forum on Health Care.  If you’re concerned about health care and the way it is going, on both the state and federal level, you can come to the first of the public forums (the rest are listed in an earlier diary) tonight at the Montpelier High School Auditorium from 6:30-9:00.  It is sponsored by the Vermont Worker’s Center’s ‘Health Care is a Human right” Campaign.  Legislators from around Washington County will be there as well.  The more we can turn out it will make the legislators see that we are gaining in strength in this movement. Thanks again.  

( – promoted by odum)

If it’s campaign season, regular GMD (and Kos) readers know what to expect:  a slow trickle of candidate diaries, designed to establish at least a baseline of credibility with the netroots community.  This first contact is followed, as often as not, by an Act Blue link.  And only a fool could miss the message:  the online community is a place to go fishing for volunteers or money, or both, but no serious politico would otherwise spend too much of his or her time in the blogosphere.

I like to think my campaign for the State Senate from Chittenden County is fundamentally different, for a fistful of reasons.

One, along with old-timers like Odum and Cathy Resmer and Bill Simmon and J.D. and Ntodd and Julie Waters and Maggie Gundersen and Christian Avard and Jack and Haik and others, I helped to stake out the cyber-boundaries of the Vermont blogosphere, such as it is.  It still isn’t anything like the maze of sites associated with California or New York, but the Vermont blogosphere has a distinct character and a solid history now because of the efforts of the group I mention above, and a whole cast of others I don’t have time to mention.  And it’s a point of pride with me to be ranked among that group.  

So when I come to the blogosphere with this diary, I like to think I come not as a first-time visitor, but as an honest to God stake-holder, one who’s pulled his weight in the community from the beginning.

Two, I’ve always thought that a political blogosphere without a three-dimensional component was an exercise in play-acting – fun but essentially frivolous.  Unless netroots sites can reliably convert digital passion into real-world results, they’re playing directly into the stereotypes with which they’re typically dismissed.  

For that reason, I’ve always made it a personal mission to bring netroots types together in real-time and actual space.  GMD and Vermont Daily Briefing have teamed up to present the yearly Hamburger Summit because it’s endless fun, yes, but also because we all believe in the importance of people coming together, talking things over, and hashing things out.  

And when VDB has co-sponsored a genuine campaign event – like the string of events we staged in support of the Obama campaign – it has always been with an eye toward heightening the impact and the relevence of the netroots.

Three, the issues near and dear to my heart have not been added to my list to appeal to online readers and bloggers.  They are near and dear to my heart because I’ve discussed them online for years at this point, because I’ve been forced to test them on a daily basis against the arguments of those who vehemently disagree, because I learned about many of them originally on sites like GMD, or Daily Kos, or iBrattleboro, or Huffington Post.

Take net neutrality.  The prospect of an internet divided by high- and low-speed delivery is not a theoretical problem for me, but a pressing threat.  My own site, VDB, would likely be squeezed out of the market for readers if it loaded three or four times more slowly than CNN’s or Politico’s online sites.  And to my mind the move to destroy the existing level playing field of the net is emblematic of the over-reaching of corporate America.  

Take another example:  our state’s pervasive digital divide.  Why don’t we have universal digital access within Vermont’s borders?  Because for eight years we’ve had a Governor who has openly ceded control of our digital infrastructure to large corporations interested in easy access to relatively deep pockets.  

One more example:  Louisiana-based Entergy’s methodical attempts to evade their clear corporate responsibility for clean-up of the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant in Vernon.  Again, you have a rapacious corporation backed by a biddable Governor; again, you have the people of the state facing a direct predictable threat, in this case the prospect of a $1 billion clean-up.  

It is the netroots community that has educated the state about the dangers and the subtle deceptions, and I’m proud to have come to this issue originally through the advocacy of others in the on-line community.  It’s an issue I’ve made my own, and one I’ve worked hard for years now, trying to make sure that the traditional media understands one fact above all others: when the truth lies either in Entergy’s press releases or in the collective assessment of the Vermont online community, only a fool or a scoundrel bets on Rob Williams.  

Experts like Arnie Gundersen predicted the infamous collapse of the water tower, and online sites like GMD and VDB disseminated the news, and the images, and the issue has never been the same.

Those are some of my credentials, and some of my issues.  But there’s one last way  in which my campaign, and this diary, are different:  I’m not here at GMD to ask for your money, and I’m not here to ask for your vote.  Yet.  

I’m writing to invite you to a party, the kick-off party for my State Senate campaign:  Tuesday the 29th of September, 6-9, at Nectars in downtown Burlington.  That’s it.  

Really, that’s it.

And I could have just posted the invitation at VDB, and called it a day.  Most of you would have seen it, and made up your own minds whether to make the drive.  But I wanted you to know that it matters to me that you know you’re invited.  I wanted you all to know that in my campaign there is now and always will be a place of honor at the table for every blogger, front-pager, reader, citizen-journalist, lurker or digital fellow traveler out there in cyberspace.  

I’ve always believed in bringing the blogosphere together in real-time and real space, and this kick-off will be no different.  Make no mistake:  at a certain point, I will come to you, hat in hand, and ask for your help putting together votes and volunteers and donations.  But for now, I’m asking only that you come and party, in an excellent bar, in a lovely city, with people who share your view of the world and how to change it for the better.

Doesn’t get any easier than that.