( – promoted by JulieWaters)

The Burlington Intervale is one of ten local food enterprises in the country to receive recognition from a project funded by the Gates and Kellogg Foundations.   Here’s an excerpt of the announcement:

The Wallace Center at Winrock International, in partnership with the Training and Development Corporation (TDC), is pleased to announce its selection of ten U.S.-based local food enterprises to be profiled as part of Community Food Enterprise: Local Success in a Global Marketplace. The project is designed to highlight successful models of locally owned food enterprises from around the world.

“We’re in the midst of a groundswell of global support for sourcing and consuming local food. Locavore was Oxford Dictionary’s 2007 word of the year. But we still lack clarity about what ‘local food’ really means,” says Michael Shuman, lead author and research director for Community Food Enterprise and Vice-President of Enterprise Development at the Training and Development Corporation.

“Our Community Food Enterprise case studies help define what local food is – and isn’t – and showcase the incredible diversity of this industry here and abroad. From web-based cooperatives to public shareholder corporations, processing plants to restaurants, sustainable fisheries to unionized organic berry farms – our case studies make clear that there is no one pathway to local food success,” says Shuman. “But these enterprises have much to teach us about replicating what works and identifying untapped opportunities that can strengthen the local food movement.”

The entire announcement is here.

Congrats to the intervale folks.  Wonder what effect this may have on its struggle to stay afloat?

I’ve now done some unpacking of the crony-based decision that came out of the Secretary of State’s office recently, which marked the end of a nearly eight year tip-toe through that Kafkaesque Looking Glass kind of world, which I’m now referring to as Kafka-Carroll Land.  I mean, just imagine a theme park built around a blend of those two authors’ works.  Oughta make a fortune.

Click here for the “unpacking” post.  This GMD post offers yet another piece of the background.

The good thing, the silver lining in all of this, is how well it demonstrates the need for a State Ombudsman Office in Vermont.  I’ve passed all of this along to some of the other people interested in the state ombudsman idea, of course, who know of cases involving not just Markowitz’s territory but other departments and agencies, and cases far more egregious than mine.  For many reasons, however, those cases never break into the light of day.

One of those reasons, and a primary one, is confidentiality of the parties involved.  It’s a very good reason, insofar as the confidentiality of innocent people is protected.  It’s a very bad reason when it acts only as a shield for the state to hide behind.

Case in point: SRS, back before it became DCF, used to cite confidentiality regularly as the reason they could not open up the records so that their actions could be evaluated.  Legislators were thoroughly snowed, and I believe trepidatious about challenging the agency that held itself out as the one, true, real protector of children in the state.  It took years of noisy agitation by a wide range of people (including myself, and the academic grounding for reform provided by my dissertation) before the then-commissioner made an unfortunate comment to the press.  He said that all the leaders of the reform movement were child abusers.

That comment of course hit the Free Press and the Times Argus, and I believe that was the moment that a number of legislators decided there really was an important reason to take a closer look at SRS.  There was subsequently one important piece of legislation passed. It said in the case of a child in state custody dying, then the agency could open its records for scrutiny of its actions in the case.

The next child in state custody to die was Alexis Cormier.  For the very first time, SRS records were opened, and for the very first time, there were headlines that read unlike any that had appeared previously about SRS.

SRS cites errors in baby case

SRS: Agency admits mishandling case

You can see the 1999 Burlington Free Press story, first part here, second part here.

That was the first crack allowing light into the workings of the agency.  Note, however, that the only case in which such a light may be shone is when a child in state custody dies.

What about all the other cases short of death that  cause pain and loss to Vermonters?

A State Ombudsman would investigate and act for the Legislature, and be directly accountable to the Legislature.  As it is now, when legislators want to know about how things work or what problems there are in any office of the executive branch, they rely on the research and advice of the people who run those offices.  This amounts, to use a phrase that’s gotten a lot of use during these Bush years, to the fox guarding the hen house.  (Indeed, I had the honor of doing research for The Fox in the Henhouse: How Privatization Threatens Democracy, by Elizabeth Minnich and Si Kahn.)

Other reasons cases of bureaucratic injustice don’t make the light of day: the people who fall victim to that meat grinder are often either too worn out, or too scared, or simply do not know how  to present their case, or to whom.  Single shot presentations to one legislator at a time work about as well as trying to use birdshot to bring down a rhinoceros.  

A State Ombudsman would be the party to present each case to, and a State Ombudsman would collect data over time, as well as have the authority to look into a case to assure that the state was simply playing by the rules.  That’s precise, targeted intervention that can put the brakes on bureaucratic abuses that currently cost the state and its citizens hugely.

Though mine is not the most egregious case of injustice wrought by Vermont bureaucracy, it is one that has made the light of day, and can serve as a solid example of why we need a State Ombudsman.

Seven and three-quarter years later, the the state has dotted its last “i” and crossed its last “t” in my Kafkaesque experience with Deborah Markowitz’s Office of Professional Regulation (OPR).  It ended predictably, providing, in the course of it all, considerable documentation that argues for the necessity of creating a State Ombudsman Office in Vermont.  I put up a featured post about it on BureaucracyBlog today–click here.

The outcome has so far had the effect of raising a few more eyebrows, and a few more people starting to talk about the wisdom of creating a State Ombuds office.  We need it the more so in Vermont, as the small size of the state makes for fewer degrees of separation between any two people in the state, and thereby increases the opportunities for conflicts of interest to be present.

Much more to come in the days and months ahead, including a book about the whole 7 & 3/4 years in the not too distant future.  Working title: Professional Breaks and Broken Professionals.

Onward.

Deb Alicen

…but after reading this a couple of times, I just can’t help myself.

Here’s to letting the democratic process play out the way it’s designed to do.

OK–yesterday I provided a little break from the presidential campaign crap, but here’s what greets me as I begin my blog rounds this morning. (Um, this afternoon–the brain still says late morning.) It’s four days old, but the day job keeps me from keeping up as I’d like during the week. This is from Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire:

Rep. Lacy Clay (D-MO), Sen. Barack Obama’s Missouri co-chairman and pledged Obama superdelegate, said Obama will gain the support of 50 undecided Democratic superdelegates later this week, according to the Columbia Missourian.

Said Clay: “She (Sen. Clinton) will not make up those numbers. This race is over.”

Not only is it not over until it’s over, but this kind of trying to make it so by declaring it so is something a lot of Obama supporters are doing these days, and it is an unsettling page from Bush’s play book.

It’s what Bush did in 2000, declaring he had won the presidency even though Gore had won the popular vote and lots still hung in the legal balance at the time.  It’s what he did about WMD in Iraq and with “Mission Accomplished.”  It’s what he’s freaking done his whole freaking life as far as anyone can tell, and so WHY in freaking hell can’t Obama supporters see that they are doing just what Bush has done and it is NOT a good thing and they need to sit down and take a few deep breaths?

I could go on (and on, and on) about how this kind of thing is emblematic of contempt toward democracy, democratic process, and just plain disrespectful of others, but I get really tired of the go-rounds.

I’ll go look now for more refreshing breaks from this kind of stuff.

(A refreshing break from the mind-numbing slog of Prez Politics. – promoted by JDRyan)

[Cross posted on BureaucracyBlog.com]

Here’s a great story for anyone tired of the talking heads and screaming commercials and internet flash predominating on news outlets covering U.S. politics these days.

In Thailand there are governmental and corporate bureaucracies to fight when it comes to projects like huge dams and coal fired power plants that would be a windfall for bureaucrats and stockholders, but devastate untold numbers of lives and homes, as well as the natural environment.

At the forefront of Thailand’s grassroots activism against corporate and bureaucratic greed are six women, profiled in an article in the Bangkok Post by Vasana Chinvarakorn  While being careful to say at several points that there are of course men who are activists, too, the article quotes Penchom Saetang:

“We have observed an intriguing aspect of grassroots movements here-the strength and dedication of the women involved with them. We don’t mean that men are not as active, but we’ve seen a difference, especially in the approaches and strategies used by men and women. While working with villagers to stop the Thai-Singapore industrial estate project at Pluak Daeng, we became aware that it was mostly the ‘aunties’ who worked tirelessly for the campaigns. A question then arose: ‘Why the women?’ And mostly of the older generations?”

In describing the collection of stories Penchom and two researchers, Sopida Werakultawan and Sukran Rojanapaiwong, have gathered in a project studying the work of the six women leaders, Vasana writes,

They reflect how a person can have a bigger heart than suggested by their physical size, ingenuity to overcome any hurdle and a drive that defies belief.

The stories as related in the article include Dawan, a villager who eventually uncovered massive government corruption, having started out by educating herself about wastewater treatment to the point of stumping the highly educated government “experts” on televised broadcasts. There are stories of smear campaigns to taint the women morally as a way of trying to get them to back off their activism. That has led, however to more activism, as one of the women reports that “…the Pak Moon people now take turns visiting each other’s families to give them moral support and to dispel any doubts that might have arisen as a result of the rumour-mongering.”

All such activism is indicative of what Penchom calls, “Jit Satharana (the public mind), a mind that cannot tolerate injustice, is willing to make sacrifices and looks toward the welfare of future generations. And it has nothing to do with “political ambition, nor planning to become a public figure’.”

What a concept.

May we all go forth and cultivate Jit Satharana and a drive that defies belief. And don’t dare underestimate older women while you’re about it.

[Adapted from an earlier post on BureaucracyBlog.com.]

In my 11/24/07 inaugural post on BureaucracyBlog.com (http://bureaucracyblog.com/http:/bureaucracyblog.com/4/it-starts), I wrote the following:

I have seen state bureaucrats possessed of as much ineptitude and malice as anyone in the Bush administration, and what I’ve seen has convinced me that we’ve wound up with something as bad as our present corrupt federal government because of our acceptance of malice and incompetence at local and state levels.

A few days later, I mentioned in another post what two lawyers had told me about cases in the Vermont Secretary of State’s Office of Professional Regulation (OPR), which investigates allegations of misconduct against licensed professionals:

Once they file charges against you, they will convict you. …[T]hey would be embarrassed not to return a conviction in a case in which charges were filed. [Emphasis added.]

There’s a very strong and far more serious echo of that in a story by Russ Tuttle in The Nation (http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080303/tuttle). Tuttle quotes Col. Morris Davis, former chief prosecutor for Guantánamo’s military commissions who resigned last October for ethical reasons, recounting a conversation he had with Pentagon general counsel William Haynes:

“I said to him that if we come up short and there are some acquittals in our cases, it will at least validate the process,” Davis continued. “At which point, [Haynes’s] eyes got wide and he said, ‘Wait a minute, we can’t have acquittals. If we’ve been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off? We can’t have acquittals. We’ve got to have convictions.‘” [My emphasis.]

So there’s a case in point, of the state and the national levels mirroring each other. I persist in thinking that our tolerance of such abuses at lower levels of government are what channeled the country right into accepting a president who’s so contemptuous of the rule of law that we have the situation we have in Guantánamo, in the DOJ, in the GSA, and on, and on.

Consider, also, that the OPR operating under Secretary of State Deborah Markowitz, who presents herself as an idealistic political liberal, shares this “win and to hell with justice” ethos with the neocon Pentagon under George W. Bush.  

(If Secretary Markowitz would like to prove that wrong, all it would take would be OPR statistics showing a charge/conviction ratio that approximates charge/conviction ratios in the courts.  I don’t think we’ll see those stats anytime soon.)

We need to change our consciousness about the business of justice.  We need to institute restorative justice systems everywhere feasible, and we need new models to be cost-effective alternatives in those situations where restorative justice models aren’t adequate.  We need to separate funding for state agencies and departments from numbers of cases won, and base it instead on new measures of how well justice is served.  

What the average Vermont citizen can do to bring about transparency and accountability in federal government is pretty limited.  But the average Vermont citizen can do a lot to bring transparency and accountability to state and local governments, starting with talking with neighbors and co-workers and legislators and selectmen and selectwomen.

Transparency and accountability. Transparency and accountability. Transparency and accountability. How, in this day and age and place, can anyone claim to be on the side of principled government without working, given one’s personal limitations,  to institute transparency and accountability?

These things are true:

   * No lawyer or law enforcement person who has participated in such abuses in local and state bureaucracies has a right to shake their head and decry Bush’s trampling of the Constitution, and that includes all the lawyers in the state who handle OPR and similar cases without agitating for transparency and accountability in those offices.

   * The same goes for every state legislator, county commissioner or city council person who has failed to take action to institute transparency and accountability measures for reasons of (an assumed) high cost, or because “not that many people are affected,” or for any other “reason.” (There are cost effective means to be had.)

   * The same goes for those in insurance companies and law offices who push innocent people to accept an outcome that’s short of justice, in any case in which justice isn’t absolutely precluded.

In short, anyone who participates in the problem in local and state realms is part of the problem at the national level.  

May we find in Vermont state government our counterparts to Col. Morris Davis.

Cross posted on BureaucracyBlog.com.

Can the Age of Transparency finally be dawning?  Welcome the Super-Delegate Transparency Project.

   From Jennifer Nix: A Little Sunlight Please: The Super-Delegate Transparency Project – Politics on The Huffington Post http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…

Super-delegates should vote according to the will of the people-the popular vote – whether Clinton won that district or state, or whether they fall into the Obama column. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just scrap the current super-deg count and say “Do-Over!!” Members of Congress should vote according to who won their districts. Senators and governors should vote how their states go, etc. Wouldn’t it be nice if they all planned to act like John Knutson, Maine’s Democratic Party Chairman? Not sure what you do about super-delegates who are just sort of free-floating party power-brokers. Anyway. Sadly, it ain’t gonna happen.

   But, at the very, very least, it should be a completely transparent process. Which is why the Super-Delegate Transparency Project is striking a chord with folks. It’s a joint effort of my blog, Literary Outpost, Open Left, numerous other blogs and volunteers, and we’re drawing off the fine work being done at DemConWatch.

Imagine, a transparent process at a presidential nominating convention.  What a concept.

And with any luck and a lot of good grassroots organizing, a concept whose time has come.  In this particular Democratic Party process, some people think, and it seems reasonable to think, that both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have reason to be uncomfortable with the immense amount of power that super-delegates have.  

I’ll disagree with our former governor, Howard Dean, chair of the DNC, that the party needs to avoid a big fight at the convention.  It depends on what kind of fight (and I think a close contest would be healthy), and for now, it appears the very closeness of the contest between Clinton and Obama is sparking this movement toward greater transparency.  That’s a good thing.

And this is exactly how these things come to pass.  When people are threatened or injured by secretive, impervious machinations, that’s when they want to throw open the doors and windows, if not tear down the building completely, to let in the light of reason and accountability.   I think it simply impossible that any super-delegate’s behavior would not be changed with the knowledge that the whole country can look in on how they do what they do.  Even the most ethical of super-delegates is likely to monitor himself or herself more closely if the process is made transparent.

And that would be a very, very good thing, in lieu of there being no super-delegates at all.

Cross posted on BureaucracyBlog.com.

“We have brought to Iraq the worst of America – our bureaucrats…” So says veteran Republican operative Manuel Miranda, as reported by ABC News http://abcnews.go.com/Politics…

In what ABC News terms a “confidential memo,” Miranda also says that the there are “scores” of his counterparts in Iraq who share the same opinions, “each from the vantage point of their own expertise and particular experience in the Embassy,” and whose names he said he was willing to share with Ambassador Ryan Crocker.

In the ten page memo Miranda first carefully enumerates all the people and efforts whom he does not fault, then proceeds to lay a range of faults squarely on the State Department and Foreign Service.

After characterizing the work of State and Foreign Service personnel as “an embarrassment,” “incomprehensible,” “willfully negligent if not criminal,” and showing “complete lack of strategic forethought,” he goes on to say, “The waste of taxpayer funds resulting from such mismanagement is something that only a deeply entrenched bureaucracy with a unionized attitude, like the Foreign Service and Main State, could find acceptable.”

One can take his use of “unionized attitude” as proof of his Republican bona fides, which we can only hope serve to enhance the credibility with which his superiors regard his assessment.

The litany of criticism continues: “misguided,” “inflexibility and the inability to understand alternative management principles,” “inclination to make excuses and…blame others,” “a bureaucratic imitation of the Keystone cops,” “gripping culture of excused inaction,” “ham-fisted,” and “I was ashamed for my country.”

The full ten page memo is located here: http://tinyurl.com/2owm2p.

Back story:

There seems also to be a backstory that hasn’t fully emerged about this “confidential memo” having found its way to public view. The ABC News story ends:

While on Capitol Hill, Miranda was embroiled in a controversy when he obtained a confidential memorandum written by Senate Democrats and leaked it the press. Democrats accused Miranda of hacking into their computer systems. Miranda said the Democratic staffers had left the memo on a computer server accessable [sic] to all Senate staffers.

It would seem that someone may have exacted payback in making this memo of Miranda’s public. That, or perhaps he arranged for it to become public himself.

Come, transparency.

Well, national progressives apparently didn’t check with progressive Vermonters before launching “Take Back America 2008” (http://www.ourfuture.org/take-back-america-2008)

Guess everyone’s gonna have to live with it.  But imagine how rankled those who still exhibit their “Take Back Vermont” signs will be.