A “lucky” confluence of events prevented disgraced Senator Norm McAllister from adding insult to injury in his relationship with the State of Vermont.

Mr. McAllister failed to file the necessary paperwork to finalize his application for a $20,000. farm grant, so the state has been spared the trouble of snatching it back from him.

This near miss has shone a light on the peculiar absence of conflict of interest mechanisms governing such grants.

Except for his failure to complete the final stage of his application, sitting Senator McAllister was in line to receive what most small businesses would regard as quite a substantial government hand-out.

Of course the peripheral irony is that, as a legislator, Mr. McAllister himself has been the first to advocate for extra hurdles and humiliations for anyone who needs public assistance.

He didn’t similarly propose drug tests for recipients of the farm grant for which he applied.

I suspect an examination of Mr. McAllister’s public and private life would reveal many such ironies, but my point here is to ask how on earth a sitting senator is not disqualified from consideration for such a grant which was only awarded to 35 farmers in the state!

It occurs to me that Mr. McAllister may have already been too many times to the trough. Has anyone bothered to explore his grant application history?

And what about other legislators?  Who else is benefiting from state assistance to their businesses?

May I suggest that one item on next year’s agenda be to ban sitting legislators from seeking public support for their private business interests?  

Duh?

After writing the letter to the Messenger, I learned that the two legislators who shared an apartment with Mr. McAllister belonged to opposing parties…one Democrat and one Republican.  I apologise for having given the impression that both were Republicans and have sent a revised letter to the Messenger.  

That being said, I don’t think we should focus so much on the partisan nature of who should have known and who didn’t.  The point is that, over the years since the reported behaviors began, there must have been evidence of inappropriate relationships and questionable behaviors for any number of people to remark upon.  It says something troubling about the  culture of privilege when McAllister’s status as a powerful figure in farming and as a state rep shielded him from greater scrutiny for so long.

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This is cross-posted from Messenger letters, where my GMD colleague, Mike McCarthy, has been taking an inexplicable beating for his comments on the implications of Mr. McAllister’s fall from grace.

Since Mike McCarthy’s letter concerning Norm McAllister’s inevitable replacement appeared in the Messenger he has been the target of a stream of angry letters.

This makes absolutely no sense to me.  Where is his crime?

Mike McCarthy is not just the current chair of Franklin County Democrats, he is a young father whose anger is understandable when the victim is little more than a child herself.

I am not a Democrat; I am a Progressive.  I agree with Mike that Randy Brock should not be the only choice the Governor has from the GOP.  I would like to see Carolyn Branagan proposed for the seat.

She is a hard-working Republican legislator with plenty of practical experience and excellent people skills. Recently, she has played an important role in carrying forward the agenda to clean up Vermont’s troubled waterways.

She is also a woman; and considering the nature of Mr. McAllister’s alleged offenses, all of the women of Franklin County deserve more than just a token apology.

Under the circumstances, Rep. Branagan’s appointment would go a long way toward healing the Franklin County GOP and restoring confidence in our delegation.

This is important not just for the people who voted for Mr. McAllister but to all of his constituents, from all three parties.

Returning to Mike McCarthy’s original letter.  I did not interpret it, as some were quick to do, as a condemnation of all Republican legislators.  I believe he was referring to the fact that two of Mr. McAllister’s

colleagues who shared an apartment with him in Montpelier were aware of the fact that a very young girl…a child to most of us… was sleeping in his bedroom.  

If those two gentlemen didn’t question that arrangement, they are either incredibly stupid or guilty of enabling the behavior at the very least.  We don’t need to know whether or not Mr. McAllister can be charged under the language of any particular criminal code to know that this simply was wrong.  He was a much, much older man in a position of power over her.  That, of and by itself, is enough to brand the relationship as non-consensual.

End of story.

One can only hope that the constituents of those other two lawmakers (and their own party) have the good sense to recognize that they have demonstrated a remarkable lack of judgement and sensitivity that essentially disqualifies them from reelection.

There is a culture of enabling which allowed Mr. McAllister to become what he has.  I don’t believe that he woke up at 60 years of age and suddenly became a sexual predator; and the suggestion by some that this behavior emerged from grief over his wife’s passing is at once unbelievable and utterly repulsive.

Let’s grow up and recognize that Mr. McAllister’s story should carry the lesson for all of us that there is exploitation of vulnerable people going on all around us, and apparently we need to do a much better job of knowing whom we entrust with representing us.  

Despite the sordid floor show that has threatened to pull focus away from the serious work facing our Vermont senate over the past week, that distinguished body did manage to pass the H.35 water bill today.

While not the long-term fix that is so badly needed, passage of the bill is an important first step toward addressing the critical condition of Vermont’s greatest natural resource, Lake Champlain.

Furthermore, it means that the EPA shouldn’t have to take control of the situation; something that no one is eager to see happen.  That agency will let us know in July what it will take in the way of limits on Total Maximum Daily Load of phosphorus to keep Vermont’s efforts independent from direct Federal mandates.

H.35 sets a price tag for the effort of $7.5 million which will come from a 0.2 % surcharge on the property transfer tax as well as fees on pollution permits, some larger farm registrations and the sale of products that contribute to the problem (fertilizers and pesticides).  

An alternate funding scheme which would have asked all Vermont landowners to make a small contribution to the clean-up was rejected, although it is difficult to see how the accepted scheme will ever raise enough money to do the job.

Lauren Hierl, political director of Vermont Conservation Voters acknowledged how challenging it was for the Legislature to frame a passable bill, and expressed measured appreciation for the effort:

“Today, the Senate overwhelmingly passed legislation that aims to clean up Vermont waters, including Lake Champlain. The hardest work is still to come implementing programs to clean up major pollution sources, but this bill sets out an important framework for moving the state toward healthier waters, and provides critical funding for clean-up efforts. I thank the Senate for its diligent work on this water quality legislation.”

To which Kim Greenwood, the Vermont Natural Resource Council’s tireless water program director adds:

“The real substance of what’s to come is yet to be proposed,”

The bill provides for performance audits that will measure the effectiveness of spending choices.  With the limited funding channels that the senate has approved, it will be all the more important to ensure that what little there is is well-spent.

Note: I am proud to serve on the Board of Vermont Conservation Voters.

Today, the Senate declined to take up the Trans-Pacific Partnership, but this will not put an end to the issue. Bernie offered his senate colleagues additional counterpoints drawn from hindsight, for those with short memories who remain susceptible to the global corporate siren song.

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BURLINGTON, Vt., May 8 – Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) issued the following statement today after President Barack Obama promoted a job-killing trade agreement at Nike’s corporate headquarters:

 

“The president at Nike headquarters told us that every trade union in America is wrong, that progressives working for years for working families are wrong and that corporate America, the pharmaceutical industry and Wall Street are right. I respectfully disagree.

 

“This trade agreement would continue the process by which we have been shipping good-paying American jobs to low-wage countries overseas and continue the race to the bottom for American workers.”

Bernie is right.

I heard the pitch on NPR this afternoon, about how Nike will bring jobs back to America if we sign this new trade agreement. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.  

Nike, the poster child of bad corporate citizenship is trying to dictate terms for yet a further surrender of American economic independence; and they’re offering… what exactly?  Their scouts’ honor promise to bring jobs back home from where they relocated them years ago?  

The only way they will ever do that is if American workers accept sweatshop wages and working conditions so that Nike’s bottom line is unaffected by the move.  Is that somewhere in the fine print of the Trans-Pacific Partnership?  We really have no idea.

The TPP is, for all intents and purposes a ‘secret’ pact which the Obama administration is for some reason hell-bent on Fast-Tracking into effect without the benefit of public scrutiny.

One has to wonder into what closet of mysteries the President has peered to have his support won over for this bizarre surprise package.

It is important not to be distracted from the untrustworthy nature of this pitch by the instinct to assume the best intentions on the part of a Democratic president.

Have we forgotten NAFTA and the flight to far away sweatshops that was essentially led by Nike?  We have Bill Clinton to thank, at least in part, for that one.

New rule of thumb: whenever the majority of Republicans are on the same side as the Democratic President, and the majority of Democrats are not, there is a good chance that that the President is listening to some very bad advice from some very influential people.

Call it temporary insanity, if you will.

Writing for Huffington Post, David Pruett characterizes the agreement as a Trojan Horse concealing a sinister agenda to cede U.S. control of many important safeguards to international corporate interests.

At the heart of the matter…er the horse… is  something called the Investor-State Dispute Settlement provision, or ISDS.  This provision would give international corporations, such as Nike, the ability to lay hands on U.S. internal policy whenever it threatened to place them at a business disadvantage.

  

According to The Economist, ISDS gives foreign firms a special right to apply to a secretive tribunal of highly paid corporate lawyers for compensation whenever the government passes a law … that [negatively impacts] corporate profits — such things as discouraging smoking, protecting the environment or preventing nuclear catastrophe.

…Or raising the minimum wage, perhaps?

That’s not something to which most working class Americans would assent if it were laid out in plain language for them, but as things now stand, it appears that we will not even be given a chance to peer into the TPP  horse until its already making mischief inside our gates.

Reposted from Fairewinds Energy Education.



In case you missed the bulletin, on May Day, the financial world just tipped a bit on its axis toward clean energy.

Forbes, that bastion of conventional wisdom on Wall Street broke with its tradition of support for nuclear energy when Jeff McMahon posed the following question in a bold headline:

“Did Tesla Just Kill Nuclear Power?”

The gist of the story is that, at a divestiture debate held at Northwestern University in Chicago last Thursday, “famed nuclear critic” (McMahon’s characterization, not mine) Arnie Gundersen, Chief Engineer of Fairewinds Energy Education, stopped Argonne Laboratories director Jordi Roglans-Ribas dead in his tracks when he based his case for nuclear energy on that tired old saw with which we are all so familiar:

Roglans-Ribas had just finished arguing that any future free of fossil fuels would need nuclear power, which provides carbon-free energy 24 hours a day, supplying the reliability lacking in renewables like solar and wind.

Gundersen called that claim a “marketing ploy.”

“We all know that the wind doesn’t blow consistently and the sun doesn’t shine every day,” he said, “but the nuclear industry would have you believe that humankind is smart enough to develop techniques to store nuclear waste for a quarter of a million years, but at the same time human kind is so dumb we can’t figure out a way to store solar electricity overnight. To me that doesn’t make sense.”

I love it.

…And Arnie had the inside story to back-up his position.  He broke the news to the assembly of earnest young minds that, at about 10:00 that same evening, they could expect an historic announcement from entrepreneur, Elon Musk of Tesla Motors, that an industrial scale storage battery was about to enter the market, ushering in an era in which the cost of energy storage (and therefore truly clean alternatives) would ultimately be driven down to rock bottom.

And so it was.  The details are laid out in Tesla’s own site, but Arnie summed up its implications for nuclear:

“So the nuclear argument that they’re the only 24-7 source is off the table now because  Elon Musk has convinced me that industrial scale storage is in fact possible, and it’s here.”

It’s just a matter of time before the cost of energy storage drops as precipitously as has the cost of computer memory over recent years.

That’s the top line news, but here’s where we dive into a little speculation…something with which investors are not unfamiliar.

Overnight, nuclear has been transformed for the ‘smart money” from a prince to a toad.  

This could well be one of those infamous “tipping points” about which Malcolm Gladwell wrote; the signature moment when Wall Street finally gets off the nuclear merry-go-round and on with the move to clean renewables.

Maintaining that nuclear is a clean sustainable option is like having closets and an attic filled to the rafters with trash while you keep the front room clean for guests and simply pray that the whole place doesn’t collapse over your head.

It’s a losing bet.

At last, Wall Street, that Supreme High Roller of Loaded Dice, seems to be coming around to recognizing that it isn’t even worthy of the gamble

Some free advice to the Bernie Sanders campaign: focus on making it a bad thing in the public eye when a candidate has too large a war chest and is unwilling to disclose exactly from where the donations came.

I know; everybody has a wish list for the Bernie campaign, but this messaging effort will be crucial before anything else even has a chance to be heard.

According to the New York Times, FEC Chairwoman, Ann M. Ravel is predicting a full-on Wild West of campaign finance corruption for 2016, with zero possibility of intervention by the FEC.  The system is irreparably damaged, and it will take a mass rejection by voters of the funding message to bring about any meaningful change.

Here is your opening, Senator.  If all of us, and you most especially, focus on campaign finance issues as a key component of the get-out-the-vote message, there is a chance…just a chance…that we might, by the power of the vote itself, begin the country’s move down the path to genuine reform.

Every time the media trumpets who has the biggest war chest in any campaign, we should be responding with questions as to how that war chest breaks down in terms of corporate and individual contributions.  What is the average size of those contributions and what has been disclosed as to who the biggest funders are?

Never mind just satisfying the rule of law; If those answers are not forthcoming, make it a defining negative for the candidate to have too much money in the race.

You, Senator Sanders, are the only candidate who is likely to have a public enough platform to make that case despite your own funding challenges, because you have built credibility amongst a populist following like none other.

If you succeed in nothing more than making that message stick, you will have lanced the boil that putrefies our body politic.

‘Just got my first ‘ask’ from the Sanders campaign, so it’s official…“Bernie for President in  2016!”  

I reached way down in my moth-eaten pockets to throw a bit in the kitty because Bernie’s entry into the race means that all of the important issues at risk to be sidelined in the 2016 debates will now have to find a place in the conversation.

So, even as Hillary Clinton attempts to be neither too far too the left nor too far to the right, and all the Republicans scramble their claws in an effort to crowd as far to the right as possible, at least one contender will be standing squarely where he always has: for unbranded equity, justice, compassion, environmental responsibility and transparency.

The admirable Elizabeth Warren insists she will not run this time, and the only other Democratic contender so far is distinctly to the right of Hillary, making him barely a Democrat at all.

It’s up to Bernie to carry the standard for the poor, the elderly, the disenfranchised and the vulnerable.

I am of the opinion that it is up to us to support that effort in any way we can. I expect many will disagree vociferously, and that’s okay with me.

He’s running as a Democrat rather than risk blame as an independent “spoiler,” as proved to be the kiss of death for Ralph Nader’s credibility.

Bernie isn’t young and he isn’t female; but he carries the standard for Vermont values like none other.  

Maybe he doesn’t stand the chance of a snowball in hell.  Back in 2007, that’s what the “smart money” said about one Barack Hussein Obama.  

However things shake out, it will be a glorious battle to reclaim democracy and I wouldn’t miss that for the world!

No candidate will be perfectly in sync with my every policy wish, but Bernie comes pretty damn close.  So that’s where I personally feel my loyalty will be best spent over the coming year.

This is an unabashed and unsolicited pitch for the underdog, and if GMD isn’t the place for that, I don’t know where that place would be.

Maybe it’s just me, but I find it a little disturbing the way the news outlets are filled with happy talk about the mother boxing her sixteen-year old son’s ears and chasing him down the street in order to stop his participation in the Baltimore vandalism.

The New York Post calls her “Mother of the Year,” and the talking heads on CNN can’t heap enough praise on this ‘intervention.’  Representatives of the police appear to be particularly enthused, wishing that more parents would emulate this feisty inner-city mom.

We are told that she is a single mother with a number of children but only one son.

She looks young enough to be his sister, so it isn’t difficult to imagine her being wholly unprepared for parenthood and trapped in what any of us might find to be an impossible situation.

What TV cameras captured that day was most likely the nature of her relationship to her only son from the moment he was big enough to run away from her.  

In fact, he probably ended up throwing rocks in the street as much because of her default to brutality in raising him as any other contributing factors.

Girls tend to be a whole lot easier to manage than boys, at least when they are little; and as the only male in a household of females, this kid was probably destined to act out if only to assert himself.

When you add the critical lack of support resources, or even good nutritional options in their neighborhood, his mom must have come close to the breaking point more than once.

She maintains control over her brood, and especially her son, through the only means available to her…fear.

…And white middle American media celebrates that because it somehow makes us feel safer.

“If only more mothers would discipline their kids like this!” they say.

So now, in addition to incarcerating young black men at a feverish rate, we want their mothers to aspire to be brutal jailers, too.

Nevermind the fact that the violence and vandalism that has exploded again in Baltimore is symptomatic of systemic injustice that we have only managed to sweep under the rug since the late 1960’s so that Republicans could claim we live in a “post-racial world.”

There is real, justifiable anger simmering out there.  It’s long been relegated to the back-burner, but in 2015, it’s come to a boil again.

This kid isn’t the problem and beating him into submission isn’t the solution.  Rock-throwing won’t be anywhere near the worst violence we see in the streets if accountability in the police culture doesn’t change, and do so quickly.

We have taken absolutely no lessons away from the upsurge in ISIS recruitments.  

Republicans still think we can keep tightening the screws on minority rights and opportunities and they will never have to give up any of the wealth and privilege they themselves enjoy on an unprecedented scale.

I heard one (white) police analyst on CNN this morning discounting the role that community organizers played in suppressing violence in Baltimore last night.  He thought it was the presence of even more police and the military that did the job.  That’s the formula that fits his expectations and bias.

To afford those community members the dignity they deserved for organizing themselves into a physical blockade would be outside of his enforcement comfort zone and give them far more credit toward self-determination than it serves his best interests to do.

It’s so much easier to think of poor minorities as uncouth and undisciplined, over whom it is the right and responsibility of a deputized elite to ride herd in the interests of the tentative majority.

Keep it up and, like the mom-whipped teen, we are all destined to get what we probably deserve.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is in the U.S. this week to schmooze with the president and other leaders, but he’s getting a lot of unwanted attention as well.

Most of the hostility is due to the ongoing issue of Japan’s failure to officially acknowledge its wartime exploitation of Korean women as sex slaves, often referred to as “comfort women.”

Though the PM and some of his predecessors have made apologies around the issue, there has been a conspicuous reluctance to fully own-up to Japan’s culpability, and many feel that adequate reparations have yet to be offered.

Those bad feelings have accompanied the Prime Minister on his visit to the U.S. and threaten to damage prospects for President Obama’s Asian trade agreement.

While this conflict claims the lion’s share of press, there is an undercurrent of hostility to the PM’s visit from nuclear safety advocates who cite Abe’s close ties to the Japanese nuclear industry and his rush to restart the island nation’s reactors following the Fukushima disaster as reason enough not to welcome him to our shores.

Yesterday, the advocacy group, On Behalf of Planet Earth held a vigil outside Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government in Boston to remind the world that Fukushima remains an unresolved catastrophe of growing environmental impact. That local crisis is being compounded for the entire nation and beyond by irresponsible waste management practices and the growing suspicion that Fukushima radiation is finding its way into the food chain.  A government corrupted and captive to the nuclear industry enables this dangerous situation.

“On Behalf of Planet Earth” shared with passersby a letter recently sent to Prime Minister Abe on the occasion of the fourth ‘anniversary’ of the commencement of that nuclear disaster, and released a statement that reads in part as follows:

“Listen Shinzo Abe: Do You Hear the Cries of the Children?”

As we stand outside the John F Kennedy School of Government, let us remember Kennedy’s words: “The number of children and grandchildren with cancer in their bones, with leukemia in their blood, or with poison in their lungs might seem statistically small to some, in comparison with natural health hazards. But this is not a natural health hazard­and it is not a statistical issue. The loss of even one human life, or the malformation of even one baby­who may be born long after we are gone­should be of concern to us all. Our children and grandchildren are not merely statistics toward which we can be indifferent.”  John Fitzgerald Kennedy, July 26th, 1963

By continuing his support for nuclear energy expansion in the U.S. as well as a dubious new trade agreement, President Obama risks finding himself on the wrong side of history, just as Prime Minister Abe has repeatedly positioned himself to be.

That would indeed be a regrettable legacy.

(Note: I am a non-technical member of the Fairewinds Energy Education crew, but the opinions I express here on GMD are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Fairewinds).

I received an email yesterday from Megan Smith and Doug Rand of the White House Office of Science and Technology (one of those mass-mailings), regarding “White House Demo Day.”  

They’re inviting a bunch of

“entrepreneurs from all across the country — including those underrepresented in entrepreneurship like women and people of color — to come here and talk about their big ideas and share the stories of their individual innovation journeys to date. These are the folks whose stories show exactly why we need to grow the pie to make sure there’s opportunity for everyone in our innovation economy.”

The WHOST letter asked for nominations of people to participate.  The opportunity was ripe for response.

Coincidentally, I also received a presser from Bernie Sanders’ office containing his letter to the President objecting to efforts to ‘fast track’  the Trans-Pacific Partnership without sufficient opportunity for review and response by those most affected,  a.k.a: working Americans.

In that letter, the Senator raises some excellent questions that beg answers before the public.

They speak to issues of minimum wage,  product safety, legal protections, and corporate manipulation of the pharmaceutical  development and distribution process which could cause widespread threats to public health.  

I suggest you take the time to read those questions in detail, because we are once again being led down that same garden path that delivered us to NAFTA hell.

Which brings me to my response to the White House Mailing (a copy of which I also sent to Senator Sanders).

In it, I told the story of my family’s modest foray into bootstrap business development;  how the banking system failed us; and how, just when we had finally gotten things going strong with no help from anyone, NAFTA and corporate heavy hitters came along to steal our market and knock us on our entrepreneurial asses.

They asked, and I answered.  You can read the whole thing in ‘comments’, should you be out of cornflakes boxes and have an afternoon to kill.

Stay tuned to learn whether or not I ever get any feedback.