I really ought to stop commenting on the ever-flowing cascade of fatuity produced by the Campaign for Vermont’s opinion essay machine. But it’s like eating potato chips: betcha can’t eat just one.

Today’s entry comes from the Master of Fatuity himself, Tom Pelham, CFV co-founder, state functionary in a variety of Administrations, and self-regarded freakin’ genius. The latest Words From On High are entitled “It’s Complicated.” By which he means, “Only I can understand this stuff, now let me explain it to you in a really condescending way.”

Now look, Tom Pelham knows far more about government financing and taxation than I do. But it’s also obvious that his insights are heavily colored by his fiscal conservatism, which makes his policy prescriptions difficult to trust. Or, in my case, easy to dismiss.

But we soldier on. Pelham begins his essay — distributed for free in the Vermont media — by slamming the Vermont media.

Over the years, it has become clear that some in the media do not fully grasp how Vermont’s education property tax system works.

Damn reporters. How dare they not be as brilliant as Tom Pelham?

His point, and he does have one, is that the media are misrepresenting the implications of the school property tax system’s income sensitivity provisions. (If that sentence made your eyes glaze over, then you’ll be in a coma by the time you finish Pelham’s mighty slog.)

Pelham may well have a point: the tax system is a tough nut to crack, and the media’s nutcracking proclivities are intermittent at best. But his underlying message is an ideological one: that income sensitivity unfairly shifts the tax burden upward. This leads to the conservative canard that lower-income voters happily approve school budget increases because they don’t proportionately feel the pain of higher taxes.

That’s just plain old bullshit from the ideological charnel house that brought us “Welfare Mothers in Cadillacs” and “Obamacare Will Make Americans Lazy.”

Actually, if you take a look at the following chart from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (which I posted last week in this space, but it’s equally relevant here), you’ll see that in spite of the effects of income sensitivity, the property tax hits working folks the hardest.

Hmm. Gee. To judge by that chart, Vermont could use a little bit more income sensitivity. Because it seems as though the working poor and middle class are still paying a bigger proportional share than are the top 20%.

Tom Pelham is well versed on the gears and pulleys of tax policy. He knows how it functions. But there’s the machine, and there’s the stuff produced by the machine. That’s what matters about public policy and its outcomes. And in that sphere, Tom Pelham is no smarter than your average reporter (or blogger).  

ICYMI, the Gannett media chain issued a disappointing fourth-quarter earnings report last week. Industry observers saw signs of trouble for the corporate owner of the Burlington Free Press. Ryan Chittum of the Columbia Journalism Review called the results “basically miserable.”

One big problem: Circulation revenues showed a slight increase for the year, but declined in the fourth quarter. The annual results were buoyed by the imposition of paywalls and price hikes for the paper editions; the 4Q falloff may be a sign of reader fatigue with both. Rick Edmonds of the Poynter Institute:

This raises the concern that capturing revenue from new digital subscribers and pairing “all access” print/digital bundles with a big price increase could be a one-time revenue event. Gannett not only failed to continue gaining circulation revenue at the end of the last year, it lost a little, as these subscriptions came up for renewal.

Edmonds notes that Gannett is hoping for another revenue boost this year, as its local papers begin to carry a slimmed-down version of its national flagship USA TODAY; Gannett’s CEO Gracia Martone says “the expanded content could provide the rationale for another round of price increases.” As I predicted several weeks ago in this space. This time, I’m not especially happy to be right.  

They’re really pushing the limits of reader fatigue. And, as Chittum reports, Gannett properties are poorly positioned to thrive in the digital age.

The medium- to long-term point of a paywall strategy is to create a new, growing digital revenue stream while protecting your existing digital-ad business and slowing the decline of print revenue as much as possible. The end game is, hopefully, an all-digital business that can support a strong newsgathering operation without print subsidies.

But a paywall imposes the quality imperative more than ever. You have to have a strong newsgathering operation to justify charging online in the first place.

Gannett, though, has a well-earned and long-established reputation for high margins and poor quality. Last year it generated 22 percent operating cashflow margins, paid out $183 million in dividends, and laid off hundreds of journalists.

And there’s the rub: Gannett’s cost-cutting inflated its profit margins in the short run and allowed it to maintain high dividend payouts at the expense of its newspapers’ quality. And mediocre media outlets aren’t likely to bring eager customers through the digital door. Chittum:

It’s worth pointing out that Gannett doesn’t break out its digital-only subscriber numbers in its securities filing. A year ago it had snared a pitiful 46,000 subscribers across its 81 papers but projected it would a quarter-million digital-only subs by now. You can bet it didn’t come close to that. If Gannett had something remotely positive to say, it would tell us.

Seen through these expert analysts’ eyes, Gannett is taking on water as it sails into stormy seas. And its captain may not particularly care all that much. During the 4Q announcement, CEO Martone was asked if Gannett might follow the lead of News Corp. and Tribune and spin off its newspaper operations while keeping its cash-cow broadcasting properties. Her reply wasn’t exactly warm and fuzzy.

In essence, Martore’s answer was not now, but maybe later.

Sounds like the captain is ushering Gannett newspapers into the lifeboats. I think we can expect the Burlington Free Press to continue cutting its news operation while asking readers to pay more. It might work in the short term, but it’s a recipe for eventual disaster.  

News consumers in Vermont are relatively blessed by the presence of VTDigger and the new and improved news efforts at VPR and Seven Days. (And WDEV and the Mitchell Family Papers, which do good work with very limited resources.) It’s a good thing, since the Freeploid is already a shell of its former self, and continues to be drained by its corporate masters.  

Submitted for your approval: a recent opinion piece posted on VTDigger by Jeff Provost, “a business owner and a member of Campaign for Vermont.” The title: “The State Is In Serious Trouble.”

Ah yes, Campaign for Vermont doomsaying. It’s such a boost to Vermont’s image to have serious people going out of their way to slag the state at every opportunity, in hopes of gaining some short-term political edge. It’s almost like they hope Vermont will fail.

But anyway, back to Mr. Provost, “business owner.” What business, pray tell? According to The Google, he is owner of Dock Doctors, which waged an expensive lobbying and advertising effort last year, aimed at killing the shoreland protection bill. Sounds like a typical CFV “nonpartisan” type.

Normally I don’t take the time to dismantle every piece of piffle generated by the CFV Laugh Factory, but Provost’s is a truly spectacular example of rhetorical parkour — the art of leaping from one point to another with no regard for the terrain in between.

He begins by discovering our parlous condition by driving down a single road.

Traveling a distance of less than a mile on a street in one of Vermont’s larger cities, I counted eight single-family residences for sale, not to mention a couple of other multi-family structures and one commercial building – all on the market, and presumably with few to no buyers at all knocking on the door for a tour.

… Either the prior owners have moved away or, because of the poor economy in Vermont, have been forced out of their mortgages and into rental situations. Sadly, it’s probably a mix of both.

Okay, hmm. A single stretch of road is presumed to be emblematic of the entire state. When, in fact, it’s the exception, not the rule: the unspoken truth in Provost’s exposition is that he hasn’t seen any similar lumps of for-sale properties. If he had, this one stretch wouldn’t have struck him as exceptional. I’d be curious to know where this road was located; there are certainly some troubled communities in Vermont with lots of real estate on the market, but there are many more that are doing just fine property-wise.

As if that isn’t enough of a death-defying logical leap, he embeds a couple of huge assumptions: that there are “few to no buyers” and that the prior owners “have been forced out” “because of the poor economy in Vermont.” How does he know how many buyers might be out there, or how long the properties have been on the market? How does he know the prior owners were “forced out”? Maybe they upgraded.

But no, he has a preconceived narrative, and he’s looking for evidence to fit.

Having discerned the health of the entire herd by reading one set of entrails, Provost goes on to quote some handy statistics: he points out our “meager” net job growth of 7,000 since 1999. I wonder how he happened to pick that year. What I do know is that it included the jobless growth of the Bush years (and the Douglas Administration, mind you) and the devastating effects of the great recession of 2008 (triggered by Bruce Lisman’s old buddies on Wall Street, mind you).

And he chooses to compare Vermont’s job growth, unfavorably, with North Dakota’s. Which is just goddamn absurd: North Dakota has enjoyed a huge resource boom since 2000, mostly thanks to hydrofracked oil. It’s like comparing Austria with Abu Dhabi. The difference between Vermont and North Dakota has nothing to do with public policy or taxation; it has to do with exploitable resources.

He then bemoans our falling population and student enrollment, which are legitimate issues to be sure. But he uses them as a prelude to an all-out attack on you-know-who in Montpelier.

All of this is happening while our most influential elected officials continue to add taxes, operate inefficient and ineffective government programs, stymie development, mandate high-cost energy and impose a variety of roadblocks on businesses that are barely getting by as is.

“Roadblocks” like the shoreland protection bill that might cost Dock Doctors some business, hmm?

All of Provost’s rapid-fire assertions are highly arguable, but he’s hoping that sheer quantity will compensate for uneven quality. And then — well, you had to know that this was coming:

Meanwhile, to our east in New Hampshire, you will find a vibrant economy that benefits from no sales tax, no tax on wages, no estate tax and no land gains tax. …New Hampshire has become a hub for the technology industry, primarily in the southern part of the state. It has also grown its population by well over 6 percent since 2000, one that is more than double Vermont’s.

Ah, New Hampshire, the lodestar of the pro-business, pro-development crowd. Live free or die! No taxes! That’s the ticket.

Well, Jeff, I hate to break the news to you, but the “New Hampshire Advantage” has much less to do with taxes than with geography. As you yourself note, New Hampshire’s growth has come “primarily in the southern part of the state.” More specifically, the southeastern corner, blessed by its proximity to the prosperous Boston metro area and its centers of learning and research that generate a whole lot of entrepreneurialism. Plus the ongoing boom in seacoast-area properties. Growth in the rest of New Hampshire — anywhere outside of the area bounded by Nashua, Manchester, Concord and Portsmouth — is no better than in Vermont. New Hampshire’s North Country is just as poor as our Northeast Kingdom.

And as long as we’re on the subject of proximity to New Hampshire, why don’t any of the Provosts of the world ever discuss our other three borders — shared with high-tax Massachusetts, New York, and Quebec? Whatever we lose to New Hampshire, we must gain back from the three rapacious governments to our north, west, and south. Especially Quebec, what with disastrous single-payer health care; disaffected Canadians must be streaming across our borders!

But for now, let’s stick to the New Hampshire Fable. Here’s an inconvenient truth: Vermont’s unemployment rate is roughly a half-percent lower than New Hampshire’s. And according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the two states’ jobless rates have tracked very closely since at least 2005. Vermont’s been consistently lower for the last couple of years; before that, New Hampshire did a bit better. Now, I know the unemployment rate isn’t perfect, but I sure don’t see any edge for the Tax-Free State.

See, taxes are not the only factor in entrepreneurialism and business decision-making. It’s actually pretty far down the list. And while Vermont does have a higher tax burden than New Hampshire, we also have better public services and better schools. Those are helpful to business. We have a climate that, in many ways, is entrepreneur-friendly; it’s easier for a growing business to gain a foothold in a smaller market, and it’s easier for a business to obtain financing when there are a lot of locally-owned and community-focused banks and credit unions, as we have in Vermont.

And now we have come to the big conclusion of Jeff Provost’s parkour adventure. And it’s a big fat kiss on the ass of you-know-who:

So far, Bruce Lisman and his group, Campaign for Vermont, are the only ones who have really attacked the problem that is our struggling economy. Maybe our current administration ought to reach out to those folks for help, or at least take a page from their playbook.

Oh, how they have “attacked the problem.” That is, if by “attacked” you mean “written fatuous opinion pieces and bought a lot of advertising time.” Reminds me of George S. Patton, it does.

Well, actually, it reminds me of the old Peter Cook and Dudley Moore routine.

PC: Do you remember that, the Second World War?

DM: Certainly, yes.

PC: Ghastly business.

DM: Oh yes.

PC: Absolutely ghastly business.

DM: Yes, indeed…

PC: I was completely against it.

DM: Well, I think we all were.

PC: Ah yes, but I wrote a letter.

You know, if Jeff Provost is right, and Bruce Lisman’s Brigade of Letter-Writers is really the only thing between us and economic doom, then we really are in big trouble.

Fortunately for all of us, Jeff Provost is wrong.

 

In the past, I have variously labeled UVM economist Art Woolf as “Vermont’s Loudest Economist” for his inescapable media presence, and as “Vermont’s Laziest Economist” for his tossed-off weekly emissions in the Burlington Free Press. We at GMD have also criticized him for his obvious free-market bias.

Well, he’s outdone himself with his newest Freeploid “effort” entitled “State taps richest Vermont taxpayers for revenue.” (Gannett paywall warning.) It’s the kind of rhetorical disingenuousness I’d expect from a junior hack at the Heritage Foundation, not a tenured professor at a pretty good university.  

Woolf’s message is that Vermont’s top earners are already shouldering a substantial burden under Vermont’s “highly progressive income tax.” The unstated corollary is that we shouldn’t impose on them any further. But his evidence is so obviously, blatantly selective that it invalidates his entire argument.

The whole thing rests on the narrow foundation of this chart:

That one chart gives birth, in Woolf’s fertile imagination, to a columnful of conclusions about state tax policy past, present, and future. And I’m sure the chart was carefully chosen to “prove” his point, since I’m about to produce other charts that show the hollowness of Woolf’s reasoning.

The chart concerns state income tax only — not total tax burden. And I think you know why: the property tax burden (local and state combined) is relatively friendly to top earners and hits the middle hardest:

(Chart from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy) What’s more, the sales tax is even worse: the lower your income, the more it stings. According to ITEP, the lowest 20% pay 5.1% of their income in sales and excise taxes. The top 1% pay 0.6%. Now, that’s a regressive tax.

The chosen cutoff point in Woolf’s chart — $100,000 — is rather curious. That’s quite a bit lower than the usual wealthy/middle class/working class/poor dividing lines, and lumps quite a bit of the middle class in with the very rich.

Also, please notice that virtually all of the dastardly increase occurred while Jim Douglas was governor. Damn socialist.

After the jump: Lots more charts!

Now, I don’t think Douglas was really soaking the rich. I imagine the increase was due to the pre-Great Recession boost in upper incomes and stock valuations.

But still, the chart does show the income-tax share borne by those earning $100,000 or more increased from 46% to 65% in a decade. That’s quite a leap. Funny thing, though: Woolf does not cite a single change in policy or law that shifted the tax burden upward.

Well, there’s a reason for that: the tax burden has shifted upward because THE INCOME HAS SHIFTED UPWARD. The top earners are taking home more and more of the taxable income. And if you earn proportionately more, of course you’re going to pay proportionately more in taxes. (That’s how it ought to work, at any rate.) Remember this chart?

First, to be clear, this is a “wealth” chart, not an “income” chart. They’re different. But this chart is still relevant to Woolf’s sophistry. Those bars at the far right, showing the top 5%, shoot way, way up off the chart. The bigger point is that the upward curve doesn’t kick into high gear until about the 89th percentile. The bottom 80% just don’t own very much of our total wealth.

Now, let’s look at a couple of readily available charts on Vermont income that Art Woolf chose to omit. Both come from our friends at the Public Assets Institute. The first shows how the top 1% of Vermont earners have seen their incomes skyrocket since — how about that — Ronald Reagan took office. (The chart ends in 2005, but the trend has continued since then.)

The second PAI chart shows how the income share has skewed to the top in the last two decades.

As PAI notes, the state economy “saw respectable growth” in the period, as did real personal income. But the median income level — the dividing line between the upper half and the lower half — barely moved at all. Which means virtually all the growth in real personal income was concentrated in the top half. And, by other measures, we’ve seen that it’s mostly concentrated at the very top. According to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, the bottom 20% of Vermont earners take home $25,500; the middle 20% earn $65,700; and the top 5% earn a whopping $243,900. The average top earner’s share is nearly ten times higher than the average bottom earner.

What’s worse, those figures include the Earned Income Tax Credit, which helps buoy the working poor.

So of course the top earners are paying a bigger share of the total income tax burden than they used to. THEY’RE TAKING ALL THE DAMN MONEY.

Whether they’re actually paying as much as they should is another question. Vermont’s top income tax rate — for those earning more than $398,350 — is 8.95%, which is pretty hefty. But thanks to the way Vermont calculates taxable income, and thanks to the many tax breaks and deductions available to top earners, the real income tax rate paid by the top 1% is 5.2% — more than three and a half percentage points lower than the official rate.

That 5.2% figure is from the Inetitute on Taxation and Economic Policy, as is the following chart, which puts the whole picture together:

To sum it all up, Vermont’s income tax takes a bigger bite from top earners, but not nearly as much as the official rate — and the total tax burden actually falls hardest on the lower and middle classes. The working poor get a break on income tax thanks to the EITC, but they still pay almost as much as anybody else — and they actually pay a higher percentage than the top 20%. Does anyone really think that’s fair?

The top earners pay proportionately more dollars in taxes, but that’s because their share of the total dollars is so absurdly high. They are not paying more than their fair share; indeed, a far better argument can be made that they aren’t paying enough.

Which means that Woolf’s implicit argument — the rich are paying too much — is nonsense. And his assertion that “Vermont has a highly progressive income tax” is accurate but fundamentally misleading.

He makes another statement near the end of his column:

The downside of that progressivity is that Vermont’s revenues become much more sensitive to the business cycle. When the economy does well, income tax revenues soar. But when the economy falters, state revenues fall by a lot more than they would if Vermont’s tax structure… was less progressive.

Hm, so we need to increase taxes on the bottom and middle in order to equilibrate revenues? Psssh. When I look at that, I see a powerful argument against income inequality: we’d have a more stable society, and more stable government revenues, if income were shared more equally.

Thanks, Art. That’s not what you meant to say, but it’s a nice takeaway from your otherwise abysmally dishonest column.  

The big news out of last Saturday’s Vermont Republican Party meeting was the resolution calling for all Republican candidates and officeholders to actively oppose single-payer health care. The measure was a clear slap at the state’s most visible (and successful) Republican, Lt. Gov. Phil Scott, who refuses to publicly denounce a plan that hasn’t been unveiled yet.

Yeah, he’s funny that way.

But the meeting also tooted out another resolution — this one on education. It supports independent schools, and opposes former Education Secretary Armando Vilaseca’s call for new limits on independent schools including a ban on public schools going independent.

So blah blah blah, Republicans bash public schools and promote the dilution of the system by encouraging towns to go indy. That’s not news.

What is news, is that the VTGOP’s resolution includes three grammatical errors.

In an official document on education.

You can’t make this stuff up.

Two of the three mistakes are in the very first sentence:

Whereas: Vermont has had a 150 year tradition of sending their students to independent schools

First, and pickiest, is that the verb tense “has had” implies that the tradition is in the past tense, that we no longer have such a tradition. Just drop the “had” and go with “has.”  

Second, the mismatch between “Vermont” and “their.” It should either be “Vermont” and “its” or “Vermonters” and “their.”

The third mistake comes in one of the resolutions:

That changes in the Vermont statutes and regulations proposed The Vilesca Report  will have a profoundly adverse effect on the education of our children and should not be implemented

Ahem. That should be “proposed in the Vilaseca Report.” Unless you meant to say that the changes actually proposed the report.

Just little goof-ups, slips of the pen. But c’mon now. A major party passes an official policy statement at a statewide meeting, and can’t be bothered to get the wording right?

And then posts the statement, mistakes and all, on its website for all to see?

On a resolution about education, of all things?

Ladies and gentlemen, your Vermont Republican Party.  

Welp, I guess we can lay to rest the New, Improved, Inclusive Vermont Republican Party: born November 8, 2013, died February 1, 2014. Ah, VTGOP, we hardly knew ye.

The death blow was struck by the Republican State Committee which, on Saturday, approved a resolution formally opposing single-payer health care and urging “legislative and statewide candidates to publicly oppose single-payer/government run health care.”

This development, reported only (so far) by Neal Goswami of the Mitchell Family Organ (paywall alert), is difficult to interpret as anything other than a slap at Lt. Gov. Phil Scott, who has been publicly skeptical but not opposed to single-payer. But don’t take my word for it; just ask Phil, who did not attend Saturday’s meeting.

“I am surprised that a resolution such as that would be put forth without any notice to people like myself. I look forward to getting to the bottom of it to find out how and why. I think that’s disappointing,” he said.

But don’t take Phil’s word for it; just ask Darcie “Hack” Johnston, anti-health care reform dead-ender and serial Consultant To The Losers. If her grubby fingerprints aren’t all over this thing, she seems awfully damn proud of it. And unafraid to point out the obvious implications.

There could be repercussion for Scott and the party should he not take a stronger position against single-payer health care, according to Johnston.

“I don’t know what the consequences may or may not be. I would expect his fundraising would be more difficult. He could have a primary challenge. He won’t be helpful to other candidates on the stump,” she said.

Nice little Lieutenant Governorship ya got there, Philly. Shame if something were to happen to it.  

The Hack, having somehow lived through the utter debacle of the 2012 election without seeing any need to re-examine her political assumptions, continues to believe that Governor Shumlin and the vast Democratic majority are somehow out of touch with true public sentiment. The anti-single-payer resolution, she claims, puts the VTGOP on the comeback trail.

“I think it’s the ticket to raising money. I think it’s the ticket to recruiting candidates to run,” she said.

Durr hurr hurr. “Raising money” like Randy Brock, who had to loan his own campaign $300,000 just to get his war chest up to HALF the size of Gov. Shumlin’s? “Recruiting candidates” like Wendy Wilton, who lost badly in spite of massive spending on her behalf?

Okay, it’s no surprise that there are plenty of dead-enders in the VTGOP who are happy to take an inflammatory hard-core position — and put their unforgivably moderate Lt. Gov. in a really uncomfortable place. But what about Scott’s slate of party leaders? What about party chair David Sunderland, who won with Scott’s backing over the opposition of the dead-enders?

Sunderland was there on Saturday. He must have known that this was on the agenda, and he ought to have known that Scott was clueless about the knife poised between his shoulder blades. I have to imagine that if he has any control of his own organization, he could have wangled a postponement.

Why didn’t Sunderland have Phil Scott’s back?

The best he could offer was a lame non-explanation:

State GOP Chairman David Sunderland said the resolution is aimed at the frustration behind the “cloud of mystery” regarding Shumlin’s plan. It is not directed at Scott, he said.

Cough, choke, snort. Yeah, it was not directed at the only prominent Republican who’s held fire on single payer, the most prominent Republican advocating for a more inclusive party ideology, the most prominent Republican telling them that they’re dangerously out of touch, and the only Republican with proven statewide electoral appeal. I can’t even imagine how someone could reach such an obviously errant conclusion.

Sure thing, Dave. But I imagine your ensuing conversation with Scott must have been an uncomfortable one.  

Big story in the Sunday Burlington Free Press (which, once again, was not delivered to my house in spite of the fact that I have a digital-plus-Sunday-paper subscription*) with the tortuous title:

*I’ve stopped trying to get customer service through Gannett’s somewhere-out-there corporate call center.

When I saw that on the Freeploid’s website, honestly, my first thought was, “Gee, I know Archer Mayor’s last novel was set during Tropical Storm Irene, but that can’t be the subject of this article — that book came out several months ago!”

But, once again, I failed to adequately underestimate my Freeploid. It was, indeed, about Archer Mayor’s “latest” novel, officially in bookstores last October 1.

Not that I begrudge Mr. Mayor any publicity he can possibly wangle; he deserves every bit of it. But really now.  

Archer Mayor publishes precisely one book a year. It comes out on October 1 every year. He does an extensive book tour in the fall of every year. Vermont media are full of “new Archer Mayor mystery” stories in the fall of every year.

And now, on February 2, almost at the midway point to Mayor’s next book, the Freeploid gets around to it?

What’s even more embarrassing, the author of this non-story was Terri Hallenbeck, one-half of the Freeploid’s State House bureau.

During a legislative session, when there are stories begging to be told.

Truly, this is small potatoes in the grand scheme of things. And it’s not near the top of the Freeploid’s sins against journalism and its readers. But c’mon, guys: Try to keep up.  

A few days ago, Bruce Lisman’s entirely self-funded “grassroots organization” Campaign for Vermont announced an expanded board of directors. Big snore, right? Well, no; in fact, CFV’s press release included the laugh line of the week.

And it came from a guy not previously noted for a sense of humor: Tom Pelham, CFV majordomo and tireless advocate for the discredited ideas of the Jim Douglas Administration. (Official Health Warning: Do not drink or eat while reading the following paragraph. It may induce choking.)

“Campaign for Vermont is a grassroots organization of outsiders – a coalition of independent Vermonters who want to have a voice for both fiscal responsibility and compassion for those who need a helping hand,” said Tom Pelham, also a co-founder of Campaign for Vermont.

Yes, he actually said “grassroots organization of outsiders.”

In reference to the hideously establishmentarian Campaign for Vermont.

All righty then. Let’s take a closer look at the street cred of this public policy biker gang, shall we? With appropriate nicknames provided by Yours Truly, of course.

Let’s start with Tom “Roughhouse” Pelham himself. In state government pretty much continuously from the Snelling Administration onward, including a lengthy stint as Jim Douglas’ Deputy Secretary of Administration. He’s been an outsider since Peter Shumlin became Governor, but not by choice; if Brian Dubie hadn’t screwed the pooch, Tom Pelham would still be a happy insider.

Now we circle back to the head honcho himself, Bruce “Moneybags” Lisman, lifelong Wall Streeter and former top executive at the late unlamented Bear Stearns. Retired with his fortune to the rough-and-ready outlaw town of Shelburne, from where he has spent over a million dollars building his “grassroots” “outsider” organization.

Hey, this is fun! Let’s continue exploring this colorful cohort of rebels.  

Bill “The Shiv” Sayre, longtime head of the Associated Industries of Vermont, the lobbying group representing our state’s biggest businesses.

Rich “R-Money” Tarrant, wealthy founder of IDX and spectacularly failed candidate for U.S. Senate.

Art “Numbers” Woolf, tenured professor at UVM and Vermont’s Loudest Economist(™).

Jason “Bigmouth” Gibbs, former Douglas Administration lackey turned unsuccessful PR consultant.

Ernie “Bulldozer” Pomerleau, high-powered realtor and developer.

Angelo “The Hammer” Pizzagalli, construction magnate whose family have been major Republican donors for decades. (Two other Pizzagallis are listed among CFV’s “members.”)

George “The Torch” Clain, longtime head of IBEW Local #300, shameless Vermont Yankee whore, now in a comfy gig as “lobbyist for the Vermont Yankee Development Trust, representing the mutual interests of IBEW Local #300 and Entergy.” Yeah, I guess it pays to be a whore.

Mary “Molotov” Evslin, co-founder of NG Advantage, a company that trucks compressed natural gas to businesses; her partner is, of course, Tom Evslin, former Douglas Administration technology czar responsible for some of Vermont’s notoriously disastrous IT contracts.

John “Digger” Powell, real estate developer and Chairman of the Board at Fletcher Allen Hospital.

Steve “Wrecking Ball” Wilk, owner of Wilk Paving, Inc. (Gee, there sure are a lot of construction/real estate types in this gang.)

Louise “Spike” McCarren, former chair of the Vermont Public Service Board and former Commissioner of Public Service, former executive at Verizon, etc., etc.

Edward “Capo” Zuccarro, former state representative and senior partner in a St. Johnsbury law firm, and former chair of the UVM Board of Trustees.

Mary Alice “The Blade” McKenzie, former president of McKenzie of Vermont, famed meat processor; also former General Counsel for Vermont State Colleges. She is now head of the Boys & Girls Club of Greater Burlington; her arms must be getting awfully tired from carrying the “compassion” load for CFV.

I could go on, and on, and on. But that’s enough to prove my point, and prove the knee-slapping irony of Tom Pelham’s “outsider” claim. Campaign for Vermont is, if it’s anything at all, an organization of insiders: the well-connected, the wealthy, the influential.

And it’s a “grassroots” organization 100% bought and paid for by the Outsider-In-Chief, “Moneybags” Lisman.  

Pity poor T. Michael Twomey, high-ranking executive at Entergy Nuclear, forced to make a dreary midwinter trudge from sunny Louisiana to snowy Montpelier and face questioning from the flannel-and-fleece-clad rubes collectively known as the Vermont Public Service Board. As reported by Susan Smallheer of the (unfortunately paywalled) Mitchell Family Organ/South, he was met by a show of impertinence:

“You’re asking us to trust you again,” said outgoing PSB member David Coen. “Why should we?”

We’ll get to Twomey’s response in a moment, but let us first assess the emotional and psychological repercussions of such harsh treatment.

Twomey said he had been personally insulted by the Department of Public Service’s filing in October 2014 attacking Entergy’s credibility and business track record in the state. But even with those insults, he said, he sat down with “those people,” he said, pointing across the room in the direction of the state’s Boston law firm, and negotiated an agreement.

Oooh, “personally insulted.” “Those people.” I do hope the PSB will deliver an apology forthwith, so as to ease the pain of Mr. Twomey’s butthurt. (“Tucks” would help, too.) Cue the tiny violins, and let us have a soothing serenade. Because it’s not as if Twomey and Entergy ever meant to do us any harm.

Twomey… said the company had “made mistakes along the way,” but the company “has been a good partner” to the state in its 11 years of ownership of Vermont Yankee.

“Mistakes.” (Cough.) “Mistakes,” you say. Let’s take a look at just a few of those “mistakes,” in hopes of gaining insight into the PSB’s lack of faith in Our Corporate Partner. In no particular order…  

— Entergy’s consistent failure to adequately build a decommissioning fund, with the result that we’ll be waiting as long as 60 years for the process to complete.

— The attempted spinoff of VY to an undercapitalized shell corporation that would have assumed legal liability for plant operation and shutdown, without the resources to carry out either task.

— Those nonexistent underground pipes that turned out to, well, exist, and in fact, contained radioactive water.

— The persistent and mysterious leaks of radioactive tritium into nearby groundwater and the Connecticut River.

— Above all else, VY’s 30-year history of inadequate maintenance and ensuing trouble. This is usually framed in terms of recent incidents, but way back in the 1980s its track record was already poor enough that Vermont cartoonist Tim Newcomb started depicting the reactor as a bruised, bloodied and bandaged reactor tower.

— Then there are the notorious recent incidents, including a 2004 fire and the 2007 collapse of a cooling tower.

As The Atlantic summed it up in 2011:

…strings of jarring failures are what many… have come to expect from Yankee.

If that’s what Mr. Twomey thinks of as a “good partner,” I’m glad I’m not married to the guy.

And in case you doubt the goodwill of Our Partner, Twomey also delivered something of a threat to the PSB, which is considering an agreement between the state and Entergy over the closure of Vermont Yankee. An agreement widely panned as inadequate, and weakly defended by state officials as the best they could do under the circumstances. (“The circumstances” being defined as “the deck is stacked in favor of Entergy.”)

Entergy has said it needs an answer from the board by the end of March, after that it will withdraw its offer. Twomey said any significant or “material” changes to the agreement would also nix the deal.

“Good partner,” my ass.  

Usually, reductio ad absurdum is something you do to another person’s line of argument. It’s very unusual to reductio one’s own argument ad absurdum, but Campaign for Vermont spokesflack Shaun Shouldice managed the trick in a letter sent this week to House Speaker Shap Smith.

The letter formally accused State Representative Mike McCarthy of violating House rules by casting a vote on H. 702, the bill to expand the state’s net metering program. McCarthy is an employee of SunCommon, the VPIRG spinoff that facilitates the adoption of solar power by homeowners. Shouldice argues that since the net metering bill “will be beneficial to SunCommon,” and that McCarthy “has a direct interest in the passage of H.702.” She then asks Smith to “discuss this violation… with Representative McCarthy and take whatever action is necessary.”



The letter also ties McCarthy’s vote to CFV’s top legislative priority, ethics reform.

Okay, a couple of problems here.

First, H. 702 passed by a margin of 136 to 8. Yeah, if McCarthy had recused himself, that bill would’ve been in deep trouble, f’sho.

Second, aside from retirees, every single person in the Legislature has a day job. And it didn’t take me 30 seconds to come up with other examples of “direct interest” in pieces of legislation. Let’s take former Senator, now Lieutenant Governor Phil Scott, who runs a road-construction company. In his years in the Senate, did he ever vote on transportation bills? How about Bill Doyle, who teaches part-time at Johnson State College? Does he vote on education funding bills?

How about realtor/Rep. Don Turner, or realtor/Sen. Ann Cummings? Do they recuse themselves on land-use and property-tax measures? After all, the professional realtors association is publicly lobbying for lower property taxes; sounds like a real conflict of interest there.  

To put it more broadly:

“We’ve got a citizen legislature,” says McCarthy, who went to work for SunCommon in July 2013. “Farmers vote on farm bills. Teachers vote on education bills. We have a doctor who votes on health care bills.”

The latter would be Democrat George Till, who not only votes on health care bills, but also serves on the House Health Care Committee. The unmitigated gall of that man!

And how about Peter “The Slummin’ Solon” Galbraith, who made his fortune in fossil fuels and now sits on the Senate Natural Resources and Energy Committee, where he is furiously active in efforts to slow the growth of renewable energy? Hmmmmm?

I could go on. And on. But you get the point.

Which makes me wonder why Shouldice and CFV chose Mike McCarthy and net metering as the hill they would die on — or, at least, make fools of themselves on. If she was hoping to make a strong case to Democratic leaders and gain momentum on CFV’s ethics crusade, this certainly wasn’t the way to do it.

Worst case, the letter will offend Smith and other lawmakers; best case, they’ll laugh it off. And assign a lot less credibility to CFV’s future endeavors.