Today was another campaign filing deadline. This report included all contributions received from the last report until 5:00 p.m. on the third day prior to the filing deadline (which would be Sunday the 12th). It was midday on Friday the 11th that the recount was complete, and the call went out to release $36,000 of pledges promised through this site and the Facebook group 1000 Vermonters for Change (okay, so it didn’t get to 1000…).

Although there were several pledgers who indicated to me they had already donated prior to the completion of the recount, this announcement from the Shumlin campaign seems a little unlikely to be coincidence.

“While raising money during the recount was challenging, since Peter accepted the Democratic nomination, the campaign has seen an outpouring of financial support,” said Alex MacLean, campaign manager.  “We are incredibly encouraged by the fact that the final two days of the filing period, the campaign received over $34,000.”

Go team!

If only those out-of-state conservatives making jokes about the “socialist paradise” that is Vermont could get a load of the state of labor in Vermont, they might change their tune.

Consider: Two of the most effective union organizations in the state (the Vermont NEA and the Vermont State Employees Union) have faced a coordinated effort by the current Republican administration to undermine, even eliminate them. That same administration has worked to undermine prevailing wage laws to the best of it’s ability. Now the administration’s number two man is looking to be promoted to the top position, promising more of the same focus on outsourcing and arbitrary firings to break the VSEA, undercutting the salaries and benefits for union brothers and sisters working in education, taking a hatchet to collectively bargained pension agreements.

And to this date, Dubie has been endorsed for governor by two “fellow” unions of the NEA and VSEA: the Professional Fire Fighters of Vermont and two International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers locals.

Solidarity forever, eh?

In the case of the leaders of the fire fighters union, they’ve always had a thing for Republicans in this state. Go figure. What do they care, I guess? Nobody messes with them, they’ve got theirs, screw the other workers and vulnerable folks – unionized and otherwise – in the state.

The IBEW is simply a case of phenomenal foolishness. A Brian Dubie administration would be an extension of the same administration that brought them the Fairpoint fiasco, driving a stake into the livelihood of IBEW rank and file across the state. Endorsing Dubie is akin to ritual suicide.

And now, according to sources within Labor, those same IBEW interests may have an ally in acting AFL-CIO President Jill Charbonneau. What’s their issue? What trumps every other principle – even the very right of collective bargaining itself?

Two words: Vermont Yankee. The IBEW has transformed its entire existence into the political arm of the Entergy Corporation, and at an AFL Executive Board meeting  on Sunday the 26th of this month, they will try to use their muscle to make the AFL-CIO proper follow suit… and given that the sympathetic Charbonneau reportedly has a relative employed at VY, they may well succeed.

More on how we got to this sorry state of affairs below…

Back during the VT Yankee Senate debate, sharp eyes might have noticed an odd contradiction. Traven Leyshon, President Of The Washington County Central Labor Council of the AFL-CIO put out a personal statement in opposition to VY’s relicensing. Clearly, there are many on the Executive Board who opposed the aging, dangerous plant – even while they support the workers. When the IBEW announced it would participate in a press conference opposing the efforts in the Senate to hold Entergy accountable, the AFL did not release a statement.

And yet, here was the newspaper photo from the press conference:

Standing to the right of that champion of worker’s rights (cough, cough) and Chief Vermont lobbyist for IBM John O’Kane, you’ll see the director of the state AFL-CIO.

So what was he doing there?

To put it mildly, some members of the AFL Executive Board were not happy.

According to sources, at the AFL COPE convention prior to this press conference, the AFL State Executive Board had a very lively debate on the issue. While there was no official vote, the majority of the Board seemed to support the notion of the union staying neutral on the plant closing (in respect for those members from the IBEW which stood to lose their jobs).

However, the majority did appear to support the union coming out publicly with a demand that the Legislature require from Entergy to include significant funds in in the decommioning fund to retrain VY union workers (possibly even to train them to build and maintain wind farms and other renewable, green, energy plants). Although there apparently wasn’t any kind of an official vote, this approach appeared to have the support of the great majority of the board.

It was also decided that Local 300 (IBEW) rank and file would have to first agree to this strategy. IBEW Local 300 President (and sometimes Democratic candidate for State House) George Clain apparently talked to his members, who – for reasons unclear – rejected the State Federation’s offer to help on this issue, and the whole approach was left to wither. (NOTE: Clain has also been a labor representative on the VT Democratic Party’s Executive Board for some time… more on the odd case of a Dubie supporter on the most powerful VDP committee in another diary)

Why? Hmmm…

After the AFL convention, who directed AFL staff to stand in support of relicensing at the press conference, in defiance of the desires of the group?

According to insiders, that was likely acting Vermont AFL President Charbonneau, who had recently assumed the top spot after the official President had been hospitalized for a serious stroke. What is not in question is that Charbonneau did not confer with the Executive Board over the AFL presence at the Press Conference.

And now it looks like the Entergy-focused elements of the AFL may be coalescing to attempt to hand Dubie a political coup with the absurdity of the Federation’s endorsement.

None of which is to say there isn’t continued opposition to the Dubie/Entergy agenda being rammed through. When contacted, one AFL Executive Board member – Dave Van Deusen – had this to say, indicating he would resign if such an endorsement is made:

In the event that the Executive Board decided to back Dubie (and therefore forsake healthcare reform), I recognize that that would signal a huge disconnect between the average working class Vermonter and the current AFL-CIO leadership. Such a demonstrated disconnect would be so great, so wrong, and so against the interests of working families that I would personally feel compelled to resign my seat on the Executive Board. I will have nothing to do with any effort to elect Brian Dubie as Governor. I suspect that other union leaders would feel the same. BUT AGAIN, I fully expect to leave the September 26th meeting with a united labor movement against Brian Dubie and for the working class.”

One wonders, though – why did labor stalwart Clain seem uninterested in a perfectly reasonable compromise approach by the AFL? Why would a longtime labor activist blind himself to everything remotely connected to Vermont workers except for the controversy surrounding an objectively dangerous nuclear plant, even to the degree of (apparently) scuttling an attempt by the union to pressure its corporate owner into taking more responsibility for its workers?

Consider what Dubie’s plans include, according to vtdigger:

* Widespread government deregulation;

*Mandatory education spending cuts or caps based on the often-disputed assertion there are too many teachers for too few students when the ratios are actually skewed by ever-rising special education teacher needs;

*Shifting resources from K-12 education to preschool and higher ed. (Shumlin would shift money from Corrections to early education);

* Changes in eligibility standards for Medicaid-funded health benefits and strong opposition to government-sponsored health reform, including single-payer. He favors, instead, cost-containment through enhancement of preventive care, hospital coordination and tort reform.

*Unspecified alterations to the current pension system for state workers and teachers.

Real worker-friendly stuff, eh?

Now consider who Dubie shares the credit for his blueprint with:

“We’ve crafted it from you business owners, from you managers, from you employees and George Clain, the members of IBEW,” Dubie told the crowd.

When I first read this, I was angry. Now it just makes me profoundly sad.

Amidst the screw-ups, masochists and self-loathers in the labor community pushing the Douglas/Dubie agenda, there are also a lot of the finest people you could ever meet. Obviously not enough of them in key spots in the IBEW and the firefighters to prevent this exercise in self-flegellation and humiliation – but perhaps there are still enough in the AFL proper to hold the line against this nonsense.

If anybody is ever to take them seriously again as institutions, they’d better hope so.

From the Vermont NEA:

WINOOSKI – The members of the Winooski Education Association have called off their planned strike in the wake of a tentative agreement with the city’s school board.

“From the beginning, we said that we wanted to reach a negotiated settlement with the board, and, tonight, we believe we have reached a deal that is fair to us, good for the school and good for students,” said Brent Litterer, a WEA negotiator and spokesman. “We are pleased that the board came to the table with the same goals we had: to reach a settlement.”

Details of the agreement are being held back for now. Hopefully this will continue to play out positively.

The real shame is that the teachers had their hands forced like this in the first place. It shouldn’t have come to a strike threat, which is an extreme course of action. We should be able to expect school boards to be good faith representatives of the community who should respect the work of the teachers.

( – promoted by Jack McCullough)

Everyone,

The recount is done and Peter Shumlin is officially our nominee! Let’s get those $100 pledges in as soon as we can and do our part to give a cash-depleted campaign a netroots/grassroots booster shot to beat Brian Dubie in November.

Here’s the link:

https://services.myngp.com/ngp…

(If you have trouble with that link, you can go to the main campaign site at http://www.shumlinforgovernor…. and click on the red DONATE menu option)

…and thanks to everyone for pledging, spreading the word, and keeping up your commitment and enthusiasm while the recount process progressed, whichever candidate you supported during the primary.

-John

During the presidential election, Vermonter (and my former officemate at the VDP) Robby Mook was Hillary Clinton’s big organizing gun, being dropped into must-win states like Nevada and Indiana to pull out a victory. But he’s not the only local-boy-done-good making waves in the national Democratic scene.

Sharp eyes may have noticed the name of Ben Metcalf on the recent press release from the Democratic Governor’s Association announcing their new Vermont ad. Metcalf is the DGA’s Chief Operating Officer, but more than simply filing reports, Ben has stayed involved in the key national party organization’s strategic decision-making – particularly as regards his home state of Vermont. If you don’t recognize him, but his name seems familiar, his mother Cindy was the Chair of the Vermont Democrats at the end of the last decade, and his father Steve (pictured on right) was an Orange County Democratic Chair, as well as being the Montpelier School’s Superintendent before passing away last year of cancer.

Besides having the good fortune of looking like Matt Damon, the now not-quite-so-young Mr. Metcalf never fit the profile of a typical DC political type. Always more fired up about the principles at stake than the game of politics itself (which, make no mistake, he knows well), Ben comes off a lot more like a straight up, make-the-world-a-better-place activist than a Washington hack (which is very much to his credit).

Ben worked with me, Robby, and many other Vermont political hack usual suspects in the late nineties to the early oughts, transitioning (as many in that coordinated campaign office did) into a role in the Dean for President campaign. Did he learn everything he needed to know to be a successful politico in hometown Vermont? Not likely – but I like to think I taught him how to scream at DC people over the phone effectively, at any rate.

Political resurrection is routine in Vermont. Peter Shumlin, Ed Flanagan and others stand as examples of politicians who have embarked on “part twos” to their electoral careers after removing themselves – or seemingly being removed – from the political scene. That’s why we should all expect to see Deb Markowitz back whenever she feels up to it, as well as Susan Bartlett. Matt Dunne is a bit more complicated. Despite his two statewide losses, his political career has never exactly “died” necessitating a “resurrection” – he just goes semi-underground for a while. Coupled with his youth, we shouldn’t be surprised to see him re-emerge as well.

A double resurrection? That’s a rarer thing. Doug Racine rose to statewide prominence through the Senate and the Lieutenant Governor’s office before falling from grace with a loss to Jim Douglas for the top spot. Soon thereafter, though, he resurrected himself with a solid show of electoral prowess in his home county and returned to the Senate.

But the conventional wisdom all around has been that this is it – that this gubernatorial election was an all-or-nothing gamble against his political career, and a loss would send him into permanent retirement. You don’t get a third bite at the apple, the thinking went – and I agreed with this thinking.

Now, I’m not so sure.

First of all, Racine overperformed against the conventional wisdom. The media and insider crowd had nearly unanimously written this primary off as Markowitz’s to lose, with possible competition from Shumlin. They were wrong, largely due to an underestimation of the forces brought to bear by organized labor and the VLCV, but also because they generally get stuck on timebound narratives without firm polling data to ground themselves in. Sure, when the media picks up a narrative, they recite it enough until it becomes reality, but that takes time. There’s no doubt that Racine’s lack of competitiveness in the fundraising department cost him at least 200 votes – and with another month of headshaking from the pundits, that number could have multiplied by ten or more – but it hadn’t yet. The media down-talking had impacted the perception of reality, but didn’t have enough time to work its magic on reality itself. As a result, Racine ends up in a virtual tie for first, giving his supporters something to crow about after the bad press.

But second of all is the dynamics of the recount. Despite all the demonstrable, quantifiable ways that the recount is problematic for presumed-candidate Shumlin’s prospects, the fact is that the unity dynamic surrounding the recount is playing out very well among the base. It’s an unprecedented level of kumbayaing that we simply wouldn’t be seeing without a crisis mentality.

And it’s popular because it plays to our fantasies of what we want politics to be, and that’s powerful stuff among the left and the center. Those fantasies and desires were tapped by the Obama administration, sweeping him into the Oval Office. Markowitz tried to tap into some of that vibe in her own campaign, but while no one of the candidates in the primary was capable of doing so, we may now be seeing that all five together can, if for no other reason than that so many people so badly want them to.

And Doug Racine stands at the center of that dynamic. The sole character in the drama who brought us along into the recount universe is likely the one who will personally benefit the most from it. And at this point, to maintain that benefit, he needs to see it through. Although a cease to the recount would, again, be in all ways a tangible benefit to the party, stopping it now could be seen as a disrespecting of the volunteers who are giving their time for the cause – a cuase many see as Democratic Party unity, rather than the simple democratic process.

So Racine will walk away in second place, but with a resevoir of good feeling across Democratic Vermont. If Shumlin loses to Brian Dubie, many will question whether the impact of the recount was to blame – but most rank and file Dems will not see it that way.

Sure, Racine will have to be smart and creative in tapping that resevoir (that he, for the moment, seems to own a large share of) for a political resurrection – he can’t just follow the same path a third time. But the point is, he does have a path to resurrect himself a second time, something I doubt even he would’ve thought possible under the circumstances only weeks ago.

The Winooski Education Association teachers will stage a walkout next Wednesday unless the school board returns to the bargaining table in good faith. For three years going, the Winooski teachers have worked without a contract, and have been subject to unilateral changes in working conditions without the benefit of their collective bargaining rights. In this day and age (and in this economy), it’s awfully unusual to see union leadership recommend a strike – and then to see rank and file approve one. It’s a testament to how bad things have gotten that the teachers feel like they have no other choice. From a Vermont NEA press release:

“For three years, the teachers of Winooski have worked without a contract. For three years, the teachers of Winooski have worked hard to collaborate with the school board on a deal that is good for teachers, good for the community and good for students,” said Brent Litterer, a negotiator for the WEA and its spokesman.

“The school board, however, has remained uncooperative, headstrong and unwilling to fully invest in the process.”

Litterer said that the men and women who teach Winooski’s children did not make this decision lightly, and they still hold out hope that a strike can be averted.

If you don’t remember, this is the school board with that had at least one member who has a history of taking marching orders from Glenn Beck (and of having his way with policy), so don’t hold your breath waiting for a good faith process.

Information on opportunities to help with a picket line or in other ways as it becomes available.

(Crossposted at Huffington Post, where nobody reads this kinda airy, esoteric crap either…)

It wasn’t the collective gasp, followed by the sigh of relief I expected. Instead, the response among those I spoke with to the news of another oil rig disaster in the gulf, along with the follow-up report that its impact appeared to be minimal, was something more akin to a collective deer-in-the-headlights episode. Casual observers – as well as the media – seemed not to know what to do with the news.

Call it “disaster saturation,” perhaps, but the response was strangely dulled – almost slack-jawed. Not in an apathetic or disinterested way, but in a way that suggested a profound sense of powerlessness and confusion, and maybe just a hint of fatalistic resignation. “Now what?” seemed to be the message in the eyes of my neighbor.

“Now what,” indeed.

As any historian or philosopher will tell you, human society has progressed in lurches, rather than in a steady, manageable growth pattern. Working against a pronounced (and understandable) tendency toward personal and cultural inertia, the human world tends to change when crises are thrust upon it. As much as intellectuals would love to see us develop ourselves along a considered path of collective self-actualization, it’s large scale changes in the status quo that get us moving. Perhaps an aggressive neighboring warlord amasses an army and invades our land. A large scale viral epidemic impacts the population. An economic collapse reveals the weaknesses of the financial system and displaces the established social structure.

This is when things really change. Some might see this as mere collective short-sightedness, but I’ve always seen us as more of a “when the chips are down” kind of species. We are nothing if not adaptable, and when you combine that adaptability with our inherent social nature and the associated evolutionary imperative of altruism, it seems clear that we are at our proudest moments in these times of crises.

And that is what makes this moment in history so uniquely frightening.

Consider: the only way we know how to make dramatic, systemic changes for the better is when disaster is upon us. It’s what we do. Sure, we fritter around the edges in the meantime, but it only amounts to so much. Like children, we learn from experience first, not so much through foresight.

But consider also the economic, industrial and environmental scale of modern human society – when one oil rig disaster can threaten to turn a vast swath of ocean into a dead zone and potentially collapse an entire region’s economy.

The fact is, that technology and population have raised the stakes of our mistakes to such an unprecedented level, that our species and our very planet cannot necessarily sustain our old way of evolving as communities. Learning-by-disaster is not a sustainable pedagogy when the disasters now take place at such a scale, they may be catastrophic for entire ecosystems and the human cultures that depend on them.

But how do you change a pattern so fundamental to human history?

The climate change debate is a crystalline example of this dilemma. Any intellectual analysis of the changes already underway due to planet-warming pollutants – even a passing analysis – should elicit enough concern to generate meaningful action, and yet what have we been seeing? On the one side, adamant denial despite incontrovertible evidence. On the other, an increase in conspicuous, emblematic “green” commodities, but very little decrease in the conspicuous consumption that feeds the crisis (and in the context of an economic downturn that is having relatively little impact on the wealth of the upper middle and upper classes in this country). And all the while, both sides spend most of their energy being frustrated with the other, rather than fully engaging (either intellectually or materially) with the actual crisis.

But the problem isn’t stupidity on one side or greed on the other, so much as it is the fundamental way we learn and evolve as a species. Human history can be seen as a process of fault response, and fault response is inadequate. This is why those that advocate stepping away from social and technological progress and returning to “simpler” times are misguided. To survive into the next century, we need to fundamentally shift from a fault response society to a fault tolerant one.

Ironically, this means looking to the model offered by the most “cutting edge,” even radical, sector of society – technology; the very sector that many might be simplistically inclined to blame for the inevitable situation we find ourselves.

IT systems are defined by their fault tolerance. Since fault can be catastrophic, it has become simply unacceptable in complex, enterprise-level operations. A hospital, public infrastructure or large corporate operation can be irreparably harmed by a systems failure – and systems failures can come in unanticipated ways. What makes an IT infrastructure sound, then, is it’s ability to continue operating in the face of the unanticipated. Back-ups, secure servers, and drives operating in parallel in such a way that allow for the catastrophic collapse of any one discrete system without the accompanying collapse of the entire infrastructure.

In this way, the Information Technology field has countered this human paradigm by working around it in an uncharacteristically forward-looking way. Critical errors inevitably occur, but the greater system is structured to accommodate them so that these problems can be addressed as inconveniences – or even as urgencies – but not as catastrophes. Generally speaking, the stakes are simply too high to allow for any other approach.

How to translate this concept to the world at large and build the Fault Tolerant Society? Obviously, as with any high-sounding theoretically notion, it’s the application that’s the hard part. We are so used to looking at social change in a polarized way; driven from the top down or the bottom up. Building the Fault Tolerant Society will take a little of both. In a democracy, fuel for change obviously emanates from the electorate, but it’s just as clear that there’s a need for visionary leadership in making any abstraction into a reality. The currency of political debate can’t continue to slide backward toward warring views of religion and cosmology, it needs to be about building a world that will allow us to continue disagreeing about religion or oil or whatever without suddenly having it all collapse out from under us as the result of our next big mistake.

As clear that this is all easier said than done, it’s just as clear that the current administration in Washington has neither the interest nor the vision to approach such a challenge. It’s simply not in the portfolio of a President who, for whatever reason, seems incapable of appreciating the full implications and urgency of the very campaign rhetoric that swept him into office.

But the first step is clear; it’s well past time for the citizenry to start asking our would-be-leaders what systems they intend to put in place, not simply to prevent disaster, but to deal with disaster – and their answers to those questions should be the among the first criteria used to judge those would-be leaders worthiness of our support.

Should Matt Dunne and Susan Bartlett have been included in Team Recount-unity? Will it all be enough to keep Democatic primary voters’ enthusiasm up and tempers down? Is the motivation self-interest or team spirit?

These are quantum, unknowable questions that can, and will be debated. One thing that can’t be debated, however, is the unprecedented solidarity between the apparent winner, the second place finisher calling for a recount, and the third place finisher who is also entitled to a recount by virtue of the historically tight finish. And while the party-togetherness alone is nice, it is hardly the unprecedented piece of this. It’s the actual coordination, allowing the Shumlin campaign to move forward without worrying about damaging blowback from other candidate’s supporters – that’s the truly unique and extraordinary part.

In light of this, it is meet and right to honor and praise St. Deborah of Montpelier and St. Peter of Putney, the Democratic Party’s patron saints of lemonade.

Generous St. Deb & St. Peter, you gained this crowning grace with your act of self denial. By faithfulness in the bigger picture you were ready for your vital trial. Please teach us by your example and help to use the lemons of life so that we may not miss our chance for lemonade eternal. Help us, too, to watch and pray for ourselves and others. Amen.

From Hallenbeck at the Freeps:

Republican congressional candidate Paul Beaudry tested positive for marijuana use while he was a member of the Vermont National Guard in 2000 and was ordered to undergo drug counseling but instead retired from the Guard.

So let’s be clear; when the guy whose whole campaign is centered around being the gung-ho, arch-conservative super-military dude was told that, if he wanted to keep serving his country, he would just have to put down the bong – what does he choose?

He chooses the bong.

I guess its about priorities.