(A note on this diary: I’m not good with tax policy particulars, and I’m admittedly attempting this on the fly. By all means, feel free to chime in with corrections of fact or interpretation…)

The legislature continues to move at breakneck speed to adjourn this week. Not thrilled about the intense focus on working to a date certain, but it is what it is. Nobody wants to be accused of spending more money than necessary in this environment.

In any event, the package that’s emerging would rejigger the tax structure to close the growing budget hole in a variety of ways. Among them is an actual cut in income tax, including the marginal rates, which amount to a (yep) tax cut for the wealthy. In this environment, no less. Arg.

It seems crazy, but its in the context of a package that will likely make the overall tax system more progressive. In this way, its easier to give the complete picture higher marks than the individual parts. The marginal cut, of course, is to do two things: shore up “fiscal moderate” bragging rights for some lawmakers, and make it more palatable to the governor (not necessarily in that order, depending on who you’re talking to). As I’ve said before, I don’t think any idea that will get credited to anybody but the Governor will move the Governor away from a veto, but we’ll see I guess.

The proposed changes reduce the rates at the middle level most significantly, and upper incomes will be additionally hit by dropping the state tax payment from the deductions, and the so-dubbed cap gains loophole – a 40% exclusion for capital gains would be replaced by a $5,000 a year exemption for capital gains income, which will hit upper incomes hardest (although will have an impact on some middle-income taxpayers as well).

Sin taxes (both alcohol and cigs) are up. There is a a $19.8 million hit to the Education Fund and $26.5 million of further reductions that aren’t entirely clear yet (at least, I haven’t gotten that far, although the media is reporting it includes $600,000 in reduced benefits for low income, elderly, blind and disabled Vermonters).

More bad news is that more revenues will be pulled via the property tax (a tax I personally rather loathe). What’s not being talked about either is a tax on all digital downloads (up to and including ringtones) which is estimated to bring in a scant $1m next fiscal year. Love to see how they’re gonna pull that one off. In any event, its a sales tax which is, again, regressive.

In terms of big picture, there’s an eye towards rearranging the overall tax structure here, rather than targeting specific revenue sources in a case-by-case way. Clearly the desire is to appear balanced (a word repeated in the press release) and pragmatic, while maintaining an overall progressive directionality – if only barely. It’s a gamble, and one that doesn’t pay off:
a) if the Governor vetoes it anyway – where are they going to go for Negotiations Round 2? I shudder to think.
b) when people start demanding a Schindleresque accounting of state jobs lost and workers displaced against individual parts of the plan, such as top-tier income tax reductions.

If the Governor signs this, maybe it will all be worth it. If he doesn’t (and I’m betting he won’t, if for no other reason than just to make mischief), then some of these approaches will have to be seriously called into question in hindsight.

From today's Times Argus:

MONTPELIER – House lawmakers on Monday rejected a controversial amendment to a major transportation bill requiring all young men to register for the draft when they receive their driver's license.

Lawmakers voted against the amendment 68-60 after more than an hour of debate over the merits of the federal government's Selective Service System, which would be used to call up an army of young men if the draft is reinstated.

Next question, which can't be resolved in Montpelier: why are we retaining draft registration, as there is essentially no chance that a draft will ever be implemented?

 

The Center for American Progress hosted a conference call for the media yesterday with Senate Finance Committe Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT), and the President and co-founder of Doctors for America Dr. Vivek Murthy. The two, along with CAP President John Podesta, discussed strategies for moving towards comprehensive health care reform by this fall against the backdrop of studies released by CAP detailing the fact that, in Podesta’s words “the relationship between employment and health care is breaking down.”

The following is a map from the CAP site presenting some of their data:

Dr. Murthy’s organization is a year-old “grassroots” organization of doctors (by grassroots, I – or rather he – means completely member-funded and member-organized and not supported by an outside interest) which is prepared to be closely involved with the discussions over and promotion of reforms it sees as meaningful. His presence underscored the intention of Baucus, in cooperation with Senator’s Kennedy’s Health Committee, the House, and the White House, to depend heavily on the support of the medical community to promote their ultimate plan, whatever it may be. Some details on what is informing those discussions after the flip…

Baucus sounds likely to be the Senate point man on this, given Kennedy’s ailing health. But he expressed a strong commitment to seizing the opportunity to make significant changes in the American health care (non)system. He indicated that they are breaking out their analysis of the problem into three parts: delivery system reform, expanding coverage, and financing the system.

Delivery system reform is the main piece they have been engaging with up to now, with their approach on increased efficiency and cost savings informed by the work of Dartmouth’s John Wennberg, who has found dramatic differences in treatment between American hospitals, and advocates for more uniform, conservative, patient-focused treatment to cut costs. Baucus suggests that some of those savings could even be passed to providers in the face of declining medicare and medicaid reimbursements, given the drop-off in recent years.

But today, the committee starts holding roundtable discussions on the coverage issue, which is likely to kick the profile of these early discussions up a few notches.

Of course the big subtopic in this debate has been the matter of the “public option.” Presumably, the uninsured will be presented with a menu of options from a variety of insurance payers. A fundamental pillar of this approach among all the Democratic candidates for President last year was that one of these options would be a publicly funded one like medicare or medicaid. The pretense for opposing this from Republicans and some Democrats is that any public plan will just be too appealing and will draw participants away from the private plans.

(Yeah, that’s right – it’ll be too good. Can’t have that, can we?)

And of course, the GOP has reason for concern. During the campaign, John Edwards made no bones about the fact that such an approach could grease the wheels to a single payer system by creating the opportunity and the impetus for more and more citizens to buy into public coverage voluntarily, rather than imposing it by federal fiat. Realistically, I’ve seen little evidence that this administration would see that as a desirable goal, and as such would not be likely to encourage such a process, as Edwards would have (and Baucus is certainly not interested, pronouncing as he did that “we are not Canada, we are not Switzerland” and will be crafting “an American solution”). In fact, many observers have been concerned by some administration signals indicating a backing away from the public option entirely, although Obama himself recently affirmed his support for such an element to an eventual reform package.

For Baucus’s part, he indicated “it (the public option) wasn’t off the table, but it wasn’t at the center of the table,” which he further explained to mean that none of the most controversial aspects to an eventual package are being discussed at this point, as there’s a desire to attempt some degree of bipartisan consensus on some of the more peripheral elements and principles before moving to the divisive ones (notice, for example, that funding the system was the last thing on his list for discussion above).

In fairness, its hard to read the depth and quality of the commitment to bipartisanship at this stage. Given the intense take-no-prisoners partisanship of this Republican caucus, any absolute devotion to bi-partisanship would seem to amount to a policy suicide pact. But in any event, at this stage of the game, the open hand must be extended. We just have to hope that, given recent history, Baucus and his colleagues have some understanding of what they’re in for in the real world of Washington, and that’s not necessarily a safe bet based on this caucus’s history.

But the good news is that there does seem to be a clear intention to move quickly, and that the grassroots groundwork is already being laid to support change. Baucus stated his desire to have a bill out of his committee by mid-June.

And, of course, none of this could happen a moment too soon as, according to Podesta, the economic crisis is causing a bad situation to get worse quickly. Since 1999, the average employee contribution for health care has gone up over 80% when adjusted for inflation (well over 100% if left unadjusted). He quoted a recent survey which indicated that 19% of employers are planing to stop offering benefits in next 2-5 years. And nationally, 320,000 Americans have lost employee-sponsored health care in March alone.

In other words, there’s no time like the present.

Despite a certain degree of exposure, cases such as Harman’s and Hastert’s, involving corruption of public officials, seem to meet the same dead-end. Criminal conduct, by powerful foreign entities, against our national interest, is given a pass, as was recently proven by the abandonment of the AIPAC spy case. The absence of real investigative journalism and the pattern of blackout by our mainstream media seem now to have been almost universally accepted as a fact of life.

Pursuit of cases such as mine, via cosmetically available channels, has been, and continues to be proven futile for whistleblowers.

Therefore, you may want to ask, why in the world am I writing this piece? Because more and more people — although not nearly enough — are coming to the realization that our system is rotten at it’s core; that in many cases we have been trying to deal with the symptoms rather than the cause.

I, like many others, believed that changing the Congressional majority in 2006 was going to bring about some of the needed changes; the pursuit of accountability being one. We were proven wrong. In 2008, many genuinely bought in to the promise of change, and thus far, they’ve been let down.

(SIBEL EDMONDS: In Congress We Trust…Not, The Brad Blog)

It’s been years since I interviewed Ms. Edmonds for internet and then national radio broadcast. Her claims have been consistent and well substantiated.

She is someone to pay attention to.

     

Crossposted at Huffington Post.

“I’m more afraid of men [in my unit] that I am with the enemy.”

Those were the words that Helen Benedict heard from several female soldiers.  The enemy was within.  Since March of 2003, more than 160,500 women have served in Iraq.  More women have fought and died during this war than in any other since World War II, yet they still account for one in ten soldiers.  But behind their noble service and love for their country, many female soliders find themselves in virtual isolation among men.  Their seclusion, combined with the military’s history of gender discrimination and the uniquely challenging conditions in Iraq, has resulted in a mounting epidemic of sexual abuse, physical degeneration, and emotional distress among many femal soldiers.  

Author Helen Benedict uncovers the harsh realities female soliders face in her latest book The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women in Iraq.  Weaving together the poignant and grueling accounts of the war in Iraq, Benedict offers new insight into the lives of women in the military, before, during, and after the war.  The Lonely Soldier was released last month by Beacon Press and I recently spoke with Benedict about her latest work.  

 

What was this work a culmination of? Why was this book started?

Benedict: I followed the Iraq War from the beginning and I went to a vigil on the first anniversary [of the invasion].  That was when I met my first Iraq war veteran.  He spoke about the lack of armor, the mistreatment of soldiers, and the number of civilians being killed.  That peaked my interest because I thought that was a brave thing to say when you’re in the Army in the climate.  I went to a meeting he was part of and that was where I met my first female veteran, Mickiela Montoya, who I wrote about in the book.  She said “nobody believes that I was at war because I’m a female.”  Then I found out one out of ten soldiers are women and I was struck that we weren’t seeing them in the front page, in documentaries, television, or anywhere.  They were invisible.  So, I interviewed her and she put my on to another military friend, and I went form there, mostly finding soldiers through veterans groups. The women were very eager to talk to me because they all felt invisible.  [So I grew] curious why women would enlist in the military and what it was like to be in combat.  I didn’t realize how much I’d find out about sexual abuse until I start talking to them.  That’s not what I went out looking for, although the first thing Montoya said to me “there’s only three things the guys let you be in the military ‘a bitch, a ho, or a dyke.'”  I was hearing that from everyone.   I wrote an article for Salon and I got a lot of response to that and a lot of women and men were writing to me saying “I’ve got more stories to tell” and I found many more soldiers that way.    

What is it that the lay person doesn’t understand most about women serving in Iraq?

First, you’d be amazed how many people don’t know that women are in the military or even in ground combat in Iraq.  Everybody still thinks of military women doing paperwork in the back room.  I’ve had people tell me “you mean women are allowed to carry weapons?”  Women have been allowed to carry weapons since after Vietnam.  It’s just astonishing how oblivious much of the civilian public is.  They also don’t understand how women experience the double trauma of combat and being harassed or assaulted by the men they’re supposed to trust.  

What were the most shocking things that you learned about women serving in Iraq?

The degree and the prevalence of sexual assault was shocking.  The statistics I found looking at veterans from several of the past wars put together showed that 30% were rape, 71% were assaulted, and 90% were harassed.  These are studies done with veterans who were funded by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.  They were also published in Military Medicine or the Journal Against Violence Against Women.  The numbers shocked me.  But what also shocked me was how saturated the military is with misogyny.  There was the horrible language about women that drill instructors routinely use to denigrate male soldiers.  The most shocking of all to me was how many women are punished or threatened into silence when they try to report an assault.  The attitudes are really bent on doing everything they can to shut these women up.  

One of the things you mentioned early in the book was the amount of distrust between the military, which is a very insular institution, and the civilian world.  Is this in any way playing a big role why the armed forces are not willing to change? Why is that?

Well, in 2005, the armed forces started the Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office.  They did that in response from pressure to Congress, who in turn responded to public pressure after Tailhook and other scandals came up.  Most of it was a public relations effort.  Although they’ve done some things that are valuable, such as anonymous reporting.  So you could at least get help.  There are some efforts.  I can’t say they haven’t tried to do anything, but is it making a difference?  It really has to come from within the culture from the top-down and the bottom-up.  

In military and civilian life, it seems that men are predominantly the perpetrators against women and men in sexual and physical violence cases.  What is being done to teach men to about violence against women and men?  

There is prevention training that all recruits [are required to go through] and they just revamped it.  It’s  been going on for a few years, but up until recently, it was a joke.  It was like those trainings you receive in your freshman year in college.  Everybody just laughs it off.  One solider said to me, “we’d watch this and someone would lean over, pinch you on the ass and say ‘Oh, I’m harassing you!'” That’s was partly because the films perpetrated old stereotypes, like the sexy woman half-asking for it.  Apparently, the new films and lectures they show are better.  However, how much can you change a culture of misogyny with videos and lectures?  It’s better than nothing but it’s not enough.  What they need to do is put into place is real consequences, not only for the perpetrator but for the commander of the unit it’s happening in.  If the commander blocks an investigation, intimidates people into not reporting, or covers it up, she/he should be punished.  We don’t have enough of that.  

Do many women become disillusioned with the military after they complete their military service?

Some feel horrified, betrayed, feel bitter, and traumatized.  They can’t even go near a VA hospital.   They won’t go near veterans organizations because they tend to be male-dominated and hierarchical, just like the military.  Even the site of a solider can make someone throw up.  But more often, I’ve found many are completely torn between one side of them that’s loyal to the unit and the ideals of the military but they are also infuriated and horrified by the abuse and injustice.  They’re torn to whistle-blow or to be loyal.  If you report the incident, you’re turning against your best friends or your family.    Soldiers are trained to see their soldiers as their family.  It’s even more traumatic when one assaults them because it’s like incest.  That is much more traumatizing than assault by a stranger because the very people you trusted turned against you.  You can’t go home at the end of the day.  You have to live with them.  It’s a nightmare.  

Do many women serving in the Iraq feel that men in the armed forces are a much bigger threat than the Iraqi resistance, Al Qaeda?

I had a lot of women say to me “I’m more afraid of men on the inside that I was with the enemy.” I heard that a lot.  Not all women feel that way, but I heard it often.  

Many authors are using books as a means for social change.  Do you see your book playing that same kind of role and if so, what do you hope “The Lonely Solider” will achieve?

I would like women who are considering the military to read this, so they know what they’re going into.  I would like it to stimulate true reform and to inspire men to be responsible and not turn a blind eye. This isn’t something that’s fun anymore.  It’s all about respect, respecting women and fellow soldiers.  

Seen on a Facebook profile: "It's been said that a black man will be President when pigs fly… sure enough, 100 days into Obama's Presidency, swine flu."

Recently spotted Facebook groups:

• The Shap Smith Fan Club. Looking forward to the inevitable Shap Schwag on Cafe Press. 

• How Josef Stalin was a 'puppet' by the vermont cheese workers union. Hmf. As if everybody hasn't heard that one a million times… 

• And you gotta love this one: Woodstock Vermont Police Need Something Better To Do, with a total current membership of one high school student. Ah, no doubt there's a story there that many of us could've written at one time or another.

Update/addendum: LOL! Hard-right Vermont Tiger economist Art Woolf is apparently terrified of being economically "asphyxiated" by organic farms. Seriously. It's a growth industry nationally, so Mr. laissez-superfaire Woolf would be ecstatic, one would think – at least if he pretended to be a neutral economic observer. Somehow, I feel confident his telling choice of imagery would be a little bit different if it were a cluster of, say, defense contractors or coal-fired power plants we were experiencing.
 
After all, as we've noted in the past (yesterday, even), these guys are hardly neutral observers when it comes to anything smacking of environmentalism, which gives them the kneejerk, reactionary heebie-jeebies.

Update 2:

Vermont Tiger is, as usual, scolding politicians (well, Democrats and Progressives, at any rate) for deviating from laissez-faire absolutism. There’ve been a few times in the past where the “evidence” to support their arguments has made me raise an eyebrow, though… and this time its particularly the case. From VT Tiger:

There’s a great deal of data on this available, if our elected leadership chooses to look at it.  Spain, for instance, has long been touted as an example of a robust “green” economy, yet the data shows that, at least in Spain, the green economy costs more jobs than it creates.  In this study, it’s estimated that for every 4 jobs created, 9 will be lost.  This new Green Math simply doesn’t add up.

This is a study getting a lot of internet coverage across right wing websites and publications – and has been pushed repeatedly on Fox News. This is where it caught the eye of Media Matters, however:

(Study author) Calzada is reportedly a founding member of the Prague Network, which, according to Radio Prague, is “an international grouping of institutions aimed at countering panic connected with global warming,” or that Calzada is reportedly a fellow at the Centre for the New Europe, an organization that has reportedly received funding from ExxonMobil.

Now, birds of a feather, right? I’m not necessarily going to throw out somebody’s work because they get money from sources with an agenda – but it certainly does raise eyebrows. And Calzada cannot be reasonably considered a truly neutral party, given his close association with the Prague Network and the far right Ludwig Von Mises Institute. Also, VT Tiger (as well as Fox News) makes no mention of critics of the study – critics such as (gasp) the Wall Street Journal (!?) (after the flip):

But the study doesn’t actually identify those jobs allegedly destroyed by renewable-energy spending. What the study actually says is that government spending on renewable energy is less than half as efficient at job creation as private-sector spending. Specifically, each green job required on average 571,000 euros, compared with 259,000 euros in “average capital per worker” in the rest of the economy.

So how does that translate into outright job destruction? It’s simply a question of opportunity cost, the paper says: “The money spent by the government cannot, once committed to “green jobs”, be consumed or invested by private parties and therefore the jobs that would depend on such consumption and investment will disappear or not be created.”

On paper, that makes sense. But Spain’s support for renewable energy came out of existing tax revenues — there were no special levies on corporate activity designed to underwrite clean energy.

The money the government has spent on clean energy may have edged out other government spending, but it’s hard to see how it could have edged out private-sector spending, especially when the Socialist government there has reduced corporate income-tax rates, most recently this past January.

And just where did that study come from? Professor Gabriel Calzada is the founder and president of the Fundacion Juan de Mariana, a libertarian think tank founded in 2005. He’s also a fellow of the Center for New Europe, a Brussels-based libertarian think thank than in recent years apparently accepted funding from Exxon Mobil.

One doesn’t even have to engage with Tiger’s (and Calzada’s) underlying premise that any job that comes through government investment is inherently bad to realize that this one study is nothing anybody should be hanging their hat on.

From On the Commons:

Vermont Law School, a burgeoning hub of commons-oriented legal thinking, has released a major report that should be of interest to natural-resource commoners. Recalibrating the Law of Humans with the Laws of Nature: Climate Change, Human Rights, and Intergenerational Justice explores a new frontier in law: the rights of future generations to inherit a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment.

. . .

These principles amount to an Intergenerational Golden Rule: When making decisions about our world, we should do unto our children as we wish our parents had done unto us.

The Vermont Law School paper can be found through this link. I’m still in the process of reading it … provocative and illuminating at the least.

Relax,it concerns proprietary information and hydro fracturing . Last winter I ran up against a puzzle when trying to find out what exactly the oatmeal like slurry spread on roads by the Vermont State Highway Dept as an ice melting agent contained .Recently I came across a press release about a company that has been nominated to win a small business award in Massachusetts .The company’s name was Dirt Glue .Intrigued by that name and concept I checked out the website. I found that this business supplies a product that stabilizes soil, potholes and prevents dust from forming on construction sites and livestock areas. Dirt Glue! Great name, great concept.  But try to find what the stuff might contain.

These products may be perfectly safe; but it is difficult to find out with clarity what they are made with. The common factor here is proprietary information, genuine real life secret formulas. Allegedly competitors would have an unfair advantage if the ingredients were publicly known. (Oddly a similar argument for secrecy is being made against making public the amount of research funding the pharmaceutical industry gives to doctors and public institutions.) This story below is directly related to Dirt Glue and road slurry only by the fact that it involves secrecy and public safety .In a process called hydro fracturing chemicals are pumped into the ground to release “trapped” oil and natural gas .Bush -era changes to the clean water act exempted this process from some federal regulations .Near a drilling operation in Louisiana cows have died and local EPA officials grant industry an awful lot of leeway.

ProPublica reports sixteen cattle dropped dead in a northwestern Louisiana field this week after apparently drinking from a mysterious fluid adjacent to a natural gas drilling rig, according to Louisiana’s Department of Environmental Quality and a report in the Shreveport Times. At least one worker told the newspaper that the fluids, which witnesses described as green and spewing into the air near the drilling derrick, were used for a drilling process called hydraulic fracturing. But the company, Chesepeake Energy, has not identified exactly what chemicals are in those fluids and is insisting to state regulators that no spill occurred.

The problem is that both Chesapeake and its contractor doing the work Schlumberger, say that a lot of these fluids are proprietary, said Otis Randle, regional manager for the DEQ. “It can be an obstacle, but we try to be fair to everybody,” he said. “We try to remember that the products they use are theirs and they need them to make a living.”

http://www.propublica.org/special/hydraulic-fracturing-national

http://www.propublica.org/arti…

http://www.shreveporttimes.com…

Hydraulic fracturing — a process in which water, sand and chemicals are pumped deep underground at high pressure to break rock and release natural gas — is controversial because of the secrecy surrounding the fluids and because the process is exempted from protections of the Safe Drinking Water Act and thus from regulation by the Environmental Protection Agency. Congress is currently considering legislation to address these issues out of concern that fracturing, and the fluids and waste that are part of the process, may be contaminating drinking water in several states.

Scientists at the EPA and the U.S. Geological Survey have told ProPublica that it’s difficult for them to assess the environmental risks posed by hydraulic fracturing chemicals because the companies that use them won’t release the exact names and cursory medical advice for workers exposed to the chemical  and the amounts of the chemicals. The energy service companies, including Halliburton and Schlumberger, say that disclosing that information would put them at a competitive disadvantage, and they insist the fluids are safe. Some information about the materials is made available through Material Safety Data Sheets, which can provide  cursory medical advice for workers exposed to the chemicals.

(Thanks to a post at IBrattleboro for the pointer.)

A one-and-a-half-inch hole caused by corrosion allowed about 100,000 gallons of water to escape from the main system that keeps the [Indian Point 2] reactor cool immediately after any shutdown, according to nuclear experts. The leak was discovered on Feb. 16, according to the plant’s owner, Entergy Nuclear Northeast, a subsidiary of the Entergy Corporation.

(At the Indian Point Nuclear Plant, a Pipe Leak Raises Concerns, NY Times, 05/01/09)

Guess Entergy ain’t got the energy to maintain yet another geriatric reactor.

While experts at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said in interviews that additional pipe leaks like the one found in February would not pose a big challenge to reactor operators, they acknowledged that it was something new.

“We were not aware of a problem before with underground pipe,” Mr. Gray said. “Now that we have one, it’s got our focused attention.”

(ibid)