Our little community blog hasn’t even reached it’s 6-month birthday, but already we’ve had a big impact. GMD has provided lefty Vermonters:

• A way to move and effect political debate
• A place for truly open political discussions (no matter who finds them annoying!)
• A clearinghouse to discuss items of interest that the Traditional Media may not be covering
• A place to organize and gather support for campaigns and grassroots efforts
• A place to create your own soap box and get your opinion out there

Through the Seven Days best blog award — voting for which closes today at 5:00 PM – we have an opportunity to have an even BIGGER impact. I went back and forth over whether or not to actively lobby readers to join the balloting, and I suppose I gave in to my baser self…

…but the truth is, a win would make a strong statement about the power and engagement of the activist left in Vermont. It would also signal that the Vermont left-blogosphere has come into it’s own, and that this powerful tool (the web) is now alive and well for liberal campaigns and causes statewide. The snowball effect that has already begun would only increase, and the payoff could be apparent as soon as the November elections.

So, I hope you’ll consider stopping by and voting. Here’s the link:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=191372308619

When you get to the actual ballot, make sure you put in GreenMountainDaily.com, rather than just “Green Mountain Daily.” Thanks!

From Bloomberg via Americablog:

The U.S. National Security Agency asked AT&T Inc. to help it set up a domestic call monitoring site seven months before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, lawyers claimed June 23 in court papers filed in New York federal court.

The allegation is part of a court filing adding AT&T, the nation’s largest telephone company, as a defendant in a breach of privacy case filed earlier this month on behalf of Verizon Communications Inc. and BellSouth Corp. customers. The suit alleges that the three carriers, the NSA and President George W. Bush violated the Telecommunications Act of 1934 and the U.S. Constitution, and seeks money damages.

“The Bush Administration asserted this became necessary after 9/11,” plaintiff’s lawyer Carl Mayer said in a telephone interview. “This undermines that assertion.”

Iraq, the “Unitary Executive,” the illegal domestic surveillance. All planned from the beginning, all part of the “new American Century” envisioned by the neocon club.

Now try and tell me with a straight face that this latest news surprises you. What will surprise me is if the Douglas administration investigations – prompted by Scudder Parker’s attempts to make this an issue in the gubernatorial race – will ever get to this, the obvious heart of the matter…

I write software for use on the Internet.  This morning I was debugging a new program which sends email that contains forms.  Forms are those things, like this blog story submission, which let you enter text and make selections from menus and click buttons.  Well, the issue I ran into was one of security for forms sent through email.

While my form worked fine for me, it din’t work for my friend in Pennsylvania.  Apparently he had a security program, possible Norton Security, which was preventing him from submitting a form from within an email.

This is a security issue.  But at another level of analysis it is a trust issue.  Because he knew the message came from me and that he could trust me.  But it didn’t matter.  ALL email form submissions were prevented by his security program.  It’s the way we think about things in general that’s the problem.  NEVER trutst ANYONE!  That’s how you sell a security program.  We have a fear-based economic system when you think about it.  There is more money to be made in getting people to “live in fear” than to get them to “trust each other.”

Society requires trust.  Money requires dis-trust.
We’re going in two different directions.  Some of us want to create a better community, a more virtuous society ( trust is a virtue ), and others want to make money.

We are literally tearing ourselves apart for the sake of profit.  We are preventing any system for discerning WHO we can trust and rewarding them appropriately.  We are focused on DIS-trusting everyone and embracing security as our saviour.

Does this sound like the War on Terror to anyone but me?  The War on Terror is a great way of making money.  It’s a horribly bad way to make a functional society.

All wars are on people.  You can’t have a war on a tactic.  So we are warring with each other to gain the “economic advantage” in the capitalistic system.  That’s pretty much where this line of thought takes me.

What do you think?

Steve

This is A REPLY to a diary entry at:
http://www.greenmountaindaily.com/userDiary.do?personId=327
regarding subsidies for the Vermont dairy industry.

Yes, this is a “case in point” about how the current political economy fails to serve us in an intelligent and rational manner.  The so-called “market” serves to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of the few BY ITS NATURE.  Government intervention serves to create dependence on government. In either case, the small producer become the victim of a larger and more powerful entity … either big agribusiness or government.

So what’s the solution?  First things first.  This is a systemic problem with the way we have constructed our society.  It goes to the root of the issue over what is “valued” in terms of economics.  We value capital, to put it simply, and therefore we are constantly addressing  problems from a perspective of capital. 

Suppose, for example, that our political economy was structured to value something else like  “sustainability at the community level.”  How would that work? 

Everything would need to be re-structured, including government, so that the contributions an individual or business made very evaluated in terms of how much “sustainability at the community level” the contributions produced.  How would this be done?  Since this system is divorced from the notion of capital ( money ) it would need to be done on another standard, such as “community coherence.”

In other words, does a specific contribution, such as milk production, increase “community coherence” in a way which produces “community sustainability.”  Does the contribution lead to a higher quality of life and a more satisfied population and, if so, by how much?

Let’s imagine that we were constructing a system on the Internet where people could express their approval for any contribution by any individual or business in terms of credits. 

Where do the credits come from?  Government.  How are they created?  By consensus, or the best agreement the people can reach, on how many should be created and how they should be distributed to the population. It’s “economic democracy” in the truest sense.  “We the people” accept responsibility for our economy.

What criteria are used to make these decisions?
Whatever criteria have been agreed upon by the people with the highest degree of consent.  If you smell a mathematical formula coming here then you are following me. 🙂

So let’s just say that this “credit creation and distribution system”  allocates everyone with some amount of credits.  You can “spend” your credits by voting for activities which you support via the Internet.

For example, if you want milk you would “spend” your credits by “voting” ( giving credits) for the milk industry and all those businesses which produce milk for the community. 

How many credits you spend on milk could vary from month to month.  Obviously, the milk industry can’t increase or decrease it’s production in a whimsical fashion.
Reason tells us that in order to maintain a stable contribution of milk there must be some “backup plan” in the event that too few people support the milk industry with their credits. 

Here’s where conservativism comes into the picture, as a representation of respect for traditional values.  What has worked in the past?  How much milk was needed to produce community coherence and a sustainable community?  That’s what would be “recommended” by a program which tells the people which industries and activities are “underfunded” and require  more credits.  If the people still don’t respond by allocating credits to these industries, the government could issue more credits directly to the milk industry producers.

If the people indicate, over a period of time, that they want LESS milk production, then the “credit subsidy” for that industry will gradually be reduced.  Again, conservatism is the rule of the program.  ( slow change )
But economic democracy is the rule of the rule. Eventually,
the “will of the people” will prevail but the “conservative rule” will prevent change from happening in a whimsical or
erratic manner.  It’s a kind of ballast on the ship of State.

Now if all of this is sounding a bit like “government by a computer program” then you are getting the idea.  But the software is more than merely a mechanical codification of existing prejudices.  It’s constantly working to write a better algorithm for producing “community coherence” in service of “community sustainability.”  It requires the people to give feedback on how “satisfied” they are with the results in every area of society.  The objective is to attain and maintain the highest possible degree of “community coherence.”  In other words, UNITY!

Sounds like a lot of work, right?  Well, the good part of the plan is that it doesn’t have to work 100 percent perfectly for everything as soon as it is introduced.  It can start small, such as in a particular industry or with a certain percentage of government spending.  Let’s say that 10 percent of the Vermont State Government budget was to be allocated in such a way, via “community credits,”  and that these credits would be honored as “equivalent to money” when dealing with the state government … paying taxes, traffic fines, renewing car registration, campground fees … so that the public would have confidence that the credits were actually “worth something.” 

So farmers could accumulate credits from people who had either received them for simply being residents of Vermont or for doing some work for the State or some non-profit agency funded by the State.  The farmers, in turn, could barter the credits for things they needed or use them to pay their taxes or other state fees.  Individuals or businesses might purchase milk from farmers using credits. Everyone would know that the credits were “worth something” because the State would always honor them.  It would be “another kind of money.”  But the credits would not need to be borrowed in order to be created and the State would not need to “cash them out” with money for as long as they were circulating in the community.  Essentially, this could result in a more sustainable community-based economy with
less dependence on government AND money.

The beauty of this plan is that it could be implemented at a small level, to help subsidize the dairy industry for example, while simultaneously reducing the need for hard currency to subsidize a failing industry.  Dairy farmers might find that the credits would make their life easier but the amount of credits might be regulated to assure that there was an appropriate level of milk production.  The whole process could be governed by the people in consort with the government using the Internet to reach consensus.

Now all of this might take some time to implement.  It might fail the first time, and maybe the second time too, before eventually producing the desired results.  These results would be to increase “community coherence” towards “community sustainability” without dependence on either government or money ( market forces ).  The idea is to free us from the “tyranny of money” and the “tyranny of government.”

In other words, we need to change the way we think about economics and politics.  As I’ve said many times on my
web site:

“It’s all us.  We are the problem.  We are the solution.”

The revolution is in your mind.

Blessings,

Steve Moyer
Candidate for U.S. Senate
http://stevemoyer.us

I haven’t seen it yet, but it’s now playing at the Savoy in beautiful downtown Montpelier. Watch this movie and you won’t be wondering about global warming.

One warning, though: I guarantee you’ll be pissed that Bush and his supporters on the Supreme Court stole the election in 2000.

I had the radio tuned to WSNO in Central Vermont, which is the local home to the right-wing hate, er…talk radio regulars. It was about 5:00 PM and I was listening to Hannity (he who is like Rush Limbaugh without the pills and with even fewer IQ points), who was at the time loudly promoting the Republican theme that the NY Times staff should be imprisoned for treason for reporting on the excesses of the Bush administration. Imagine my surprise at the commercial break to hear the following:

The Sean Hannity show is sponsored by the Barre Technical Center

The Barre Technical Center, as it’s website says, is “considered an extension of the curriculum of Cabot, Harwood, Montpelier, Spaulding, Twinfield and U-32 high schools.” This means that taxpayers of all stripes are feeding into this school from these towns, and ultimately from across the state through the State Education Fund.

Now consider what your tax dollars are paying to support:

HANNITY: Here’s what is bothering me, John. Barack Obama said, quote, “We are helping the insurgency,” unquote. John Kerry himself said American soldiers need not be getting — going into the homes of Iraqis terrorizing women and children. Harry Reid said our presence is a problem, we’re an occupying force. This is almost now coming out on a daily basis, these attacks against our brave men and women. (link)

Ladies and gentlemen, this is a classic example of modern liberalism. Hatred, hatred, hatred for Bush and anyone associated with him. Throw him in jail! He testified four times before the — all right, I’m going to ask you again, [caller]. Do you really want to convict somebody on the idea that he just testified four times before the grand jury? I ask you again, what evidence do you have — you’re so certain that Karl Rove leaked. Where’s the evidence?(link)

LEWIS: You know, I saw kind of a different protest out there. There were a lot of things going on. It really affected me to see so many Iraq veterans out there marching in front of the White House, talking about their experiences and why they’re disillusioned with this policy. You know, it’s —

HANNITY: All right, Ted, I honestly, I’m not really — I don’t care about your thoughts. You can tell them to Alan. I’m not asking you that.
(link)

Hannity has “pledged that stopping Hillary Clinton from becoming president of the United States would be a major focus of his program,” according to a June 20 article on conservative website NewsMax.com, a promoter of Klein’s book. Similarly, a spokesman for Sentinel, the book’s publisher, has said that “he hoped that The Truth About Hillary would do to Clinton what the Swift Boat Veterans bestseller did to [Sen. John] Kerry.” (link)

O’DONNELL: Oh, my God, Sean, don’t you see the pictures from Abu Ghraib?

[crosstalk]

HANNITY: Where’s the evidence?

O’DONNELL: Hello?

HANNITY: There was underwear on the head of one of them. We’re not raping and killing anybody. (link)

HANNITY: Amnesty International is a radical left-wing group. (link)

…and that’s nothing. go to Media Matters and do a search on Hannity and you’ll get far more than outrageous statements. You’ll see a list of outright lies and personal smears all in the unwavering service of the Bush administration, and at the expense of truth, as well as the good name of any who would question him

And he is sponsored by the Barre Technical Center.

I haven’t talked to anyone there (yet), but I’m going to hazard a guess that one might get an earful about “reaching out to working class parents and families.” If that is the rationale, let me just say as a product of a working class family that I would find any such patronizing characterization of working class people as jingoistic, venom-spewing hate mongers as personally insulting as well as demonstrably inaccurate.

But even if it were true, who cares? Hannity doesn’t simply cross a line into a class of propoganda that shouldn’t be funded with my taxes, he leaves the line in the dust.

If you agree that your tax money should never, ever be used to prop up the National Republican attack-and-smear noise machine, here is the way to contact those who should hear from you:

Superintendent’s Office
120 Ayers Street
Barre, Vermont 05641
1-802-476-5011

( – promoted by odum)

Today’s Times-Argus features an op/ed by Rep. Thomas Koch, a Republican member of the Vermont House of Representatives,  castigating liberals for being illiberal. Koch highlights a number of recent acts of civil disobedience by Vermont rabble-rousers as evidence that liberals don’t believe in liberalism anymore because we dare to break a few rules (and laws) here and there. Whatever.

It strikes me as hilarious that people like Koch – and many of the liberals he and I both dislike – have apparently forgotten how social and political change has taken place in this country. Name, for example, any major social or political change that wasn’t accompanied by some good old-fashioned civil disobedience. It hasn’t happened.

Beginning with the founding of this nation, substantive change has always been accompanied by acts of civil disobedience. Slavery. Women’s suffrage. Civil rights. Vietnam. Granted, civil disobedience wasn’t the ONLY ingredient to the change, but it was a necessary ingredient – kind of like the flour for bread.

And to ignore this history of social change is to deny the very founding ideals of this nation. We were being pushed around and we fought back – not with mere polite requests to the King of England, but with “illegal” and – gasp! – “illiberal” acts.

Thank goodness the Koch’s of the world were overwhelmed by the reason and the passion necessary to overcome the past ills that have plagued this nation. And, hopefully, they’ll be overwhelmed once again (and again and again) as new ills and injustices are confronted.

Memo to Koch: Read some history for crying out loud.

P.S. My favorite line in the Koch editorial is this one: “Amid the yelling and the consequent arrests, the demonstrators precise message was lost…” Hardly, the “precise message” was splashed across every newspaper in the state and on every television and radio broadcast in the state — and beyond. If Negroponte’s little party hadn’t been crashed, few in this state would have known of his visit or his hideous past.

Cross-posted from Rational Resistance

I’ll summarize this but it’s worth reading the whole story in Slate today.

It’s a bit of a small point from today’s Supreme Court decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. It hinges on a standard tool for determining legislative intent. In interpreting a statute, if the court finds that the language of the statute is clear, the clear language of the statute controls. The question, though, is what to do if the language is ambiguous. One of the standard tools is legislative history, which encompasses a range of information, including statements made during debate on the legislation. It makes sense, right? If we want to know what Congress meant when they passed a law, see what they were saying about it when they passed it.

In this case, a big issue was the correct interpretation of the Detainee Treatment Act, which was passed last December. Late in December, after the bill was passed, when nobody else was around, John Kyl (R-Tex.) and Lindsey Graham (R- S.C.) inserted a phony dialogue in the Congressional Record, making it look as though it was a colloquy they held during floor debate on the bill. Then, they used the language they inserted into the record as the basis for an amicus curiae brief they filed in the Supreme Court to argue for their preferred interpretation.

Too bad for them, though.

Either Justice Stevens or his clerk was too smart for them, discovered this, and actually called them out on it. Here’s what he said in a footnote of his opinion: “While statements attributed to the final bill’s two other sponsors, Senators Graham and Kyl, arguably contradict Senator Levin’s contention that the final version of the Act preserved jurisdiction over pending habeas cases … those statements appear to have been inserted in the Congressional Record after the Senate debate.”

You certainly wouldn’t expect anything better than this from Kyl, but Graham likes to put on a show of being more moderate, presumably grooming himself for an eventual presidential run. What this shows, though, is that he is devoid of integrity and cannot be trusted.

It must be election season in Vermont because everyone is jumping at the chance to throw money at the state’s dairy farmers. Even our “I hate government spending” governor, Jim Douglas, has stepped up to the plate with a program that will provide millions to the struggling dairy farmers. But can you say: too little, too late. I knew you could. Because that’s exactly what all the “look at me, I’m helping dairy farmers” proposals amount to. And, worse, I guarantee that after November’s elections all these crocodile tears for farmers will be long gone.

Anthony Pollina and Vermont’s Progressive Party have what should be the best shot at addressing the issue of the struggling dairy industry in Vermont. He has, after all, proclaimed it as his top priority for over 15 years (how’s that going, by the way?). But, like most of the Prog proposals, their plan for helping diary farmers seems timid, tepid, and just a smidgen better than what the two-party duopoly is proposing. Ugh.

To be specific, Pollina and the Progs have rolled out their traditional rhetoric about the need for a “state-sponsored” milk processing plant and a renewed (and renewed and renewed) call for state institutions to purchase Vermont milk products. On paper, it all sounds hunky-dory. But why can’t these folks ever get anything off of the paper and into reality?

If, as they argue, the milk processors are the ones reaping so much benefit from the toil of the farmers, why is Pollina & Co. having such a hard time raising the capital to start their own processing plant? They’ve put this issue on the table for years, first trying (unsuccessfully) to get the state to pony up the money for it two years ago. Then they declared in a huff that they would fund it privately. Again, how’s that going?

It would be much more satisfying for Vermont’s supposed “other” party to avoid the rhetoric and get to what’s really wrong with Vermont’s dairy industry. And what’s that? Well, for starters, industrial agriculture. The dirty little secret in this whole debate is that Vermont dairy farmers CAN’T compete in the market they’re playing in. It’s impossible. Period. Vermont doesn’t have the flat land or the climate to compete with the mega-dairies of the south and west.

But Pollina’s love affair with the notion that he’ll be elected SOMEDAY for SOMETHING prevents him from casting aspersions at industrial agriculture. Remember, he was the one who condemned attacks on Cabot when they were gleefully using Monsanto’s bovine growth hormone (rBGH) and poured cold water on the spotlight activist groups attempted to put on Ben & Jerry’s use of toxic pesticides (fundraising always seems to trump principles in the Prog camp).

Go ahead, folks, keep pitching your pennies at the poor farmers. But, sooner or later, we’ll all have to get at what’s real with this issue: capitalism and small dairy farming doesn’t mix.

Until then, enjoy the show – and don’t forget your hanky.

Three announcements to make before I let any more time go by:

• The DorianGrays: Inspired by Oscar Wilde’s classic Picture of Dorian Gray, GMD has a new feature that will track two things over the coming months. First – any nasty campaign tricks that come from the major candidates for the most contested statewide offices in Vermont, and second – the ongoing excesses of the new US Supreme Court, following the capitualtion by several Democratic Senators on the unsuccessful Alito filibuster attempt.

  Confused? Curious? Click on the DorianGrays button atop the page, or just use this link. A work in progress, to be sure.

• Seven Days’ Blog Contest: I’m not going to go over the top pimping this (I don’t think…maybe I’ll send an email to registered users…hmm…), but the annual “Daysies” are including a “best blog” category. Please consider GMD — or Jack’s blog, or Vermonter’s, or Mataliandy’s. Too bad ya can’t vote for more than one. Here’s the link to vote Make sure you use the blog’s URL (web address) rather than it’s name, whether you’re voting for this one or another.
• …and it’s high time for a formal introduction of your GMD team. Along with myself, sharing front page duties are bloggers Jack McCullough and Ed Garcia (otherwise known to Kossacks as kestrel9000). Also providing occasional content is Vermonter, even more occasionally gnome, and taking over the linkdump/newsdump responsibilities is Brattlerouser. Mataliandy‘s life has not allowed her to do the front page thing, but she may still pop in from time to time.

…and of course, we will continue to front page user diaries when the cosmic forces tell us to, as well as occasionally entice a guest superstar blogger or two. Thanks for all the attention, folks! I think I speak for all when I say we’re having a blast!