As the Vermont Legislature attempts to squeeze water from a stone in satisfying the many demands of state with few available revenue streams, one of the victims of that squeeze may prove to be working class contributors and the charitable interests they would like to support.

Deep in the weeds of tax reform legislation being considered by our representatives is a provision that would eliminate the tax benefit from charitable contributions, when the individual donor contributes less than $5,000. in total to all recipients.

That means that, while those wealthiest enough to contribute more than $5,000. in total can still claim a 5% deduction on those contributions, the rest of us are just out of luck.  

The devaluation of the small donor is only part of the challenge that non-profits will face under this proposal, but it is the part that stings the most.

As Lauren-Glenn Davitian of Common Ground explained the issues to me:

The House Bill H.489 seeks to generate $16M of a $32M hole by capping deductions at 2.5 standard deductions. The challenge for nonprofits with this is that mortgage, health and property tax deductions are fixed. Charitable giving is discretionary. Particularly for individual filers as the income approaches $100K, they will not be able to deduct most of what they give from their state taxes.

The Senate Bill (not yet out of House Finance) poses a different issue: It offers a charitable tax credit (which is taken off the state tax bottom line) only if you give MORE THAN $5K to instate charities (designated by state tax dept). Then you can take 5% of the amount in excess of $5K.

This benefits big givers and not most of the charitable donors who itemize. The average gift is $2800 and not until you approach $300K in annual giving. Those people just start to reach $5K in gifts.

Overall, the scheme seems destined to drive-down charitable contributions in general.

So, once again, rather than raising revenue by directly increasing top earner’s tax rates, the proposal is to move down the food chain to “find” money in the shallow pockets of those who earn the least and those who need the most.  

And what of the arcane system of deductions that is supposed to be one of the targets for tax reform? As far as I can tell, in this instance, it will be just as arcane as ever.

A little extra credit is due to Democratic Congressman Peter Welch, who just stared down the corporate spin doctors of the corn lobby.

You may recently recall hearing some rumblings from the peanut gallery, about the Congressman having betrayed his environmental base by collaborating with Big Oil.  That peanut gallery should more accurately be described as a “corn crib,” because the chief complainant, Brooke Coleman, turns out to be the executive director of the Advanced Ethanol Council.   Big surprise.

If you, considered the source as I did, it may have caused barely a flutter in your consciousness.

Nonetheless, he deserves a quiet hand of applause for his articulate response.

What Congressman Welch had the temerity to do was to seize an opportunity for meaningful reform to the misguided ethanol mandate.  That bill of goods, sold to the American public amid the confused messaging of the early Bush years, (kind of like weapons of mass destruction), stubbornly refuses to die, despite its exposure as having been based on faulty assumptions.

In Welch’s own words:

In addition to being costly to farmers, small-engine operators and families, ethanol is inflicting significant damage on the environment. Studies indicate that greenhouse gas emissions from corn ethanol are 28 percent higher than gasoline. Also, it takes 170 gallons of water to produce a gallon of ethanol as opposed to the five gallons it takes to produce a gallon of gas.

Welch has essentially denounced corn-based ethanol for the environmental Trojan Horse that it actually represents…and this has the corn lobby incensed!

When you step on Monsanto’s toes, you’d better be packing a posse of heavy-weights.

In this case, that posse happens to consist of  a couple of Congressman Welch’s Republican colleagues.

As Republicans in general have a far warmer relationship with big oil and big corn than do Democrats, it is helpful when some opportunity for movement is made possible by an odd intersection of interests.

So far, we have successfully repealed two of the three industry subsidies, the tax break and special trade preferences. Our work will not be done until we reform the ethanol fuel blending mandate.

On another occasion, Welch has been quoted as characterizing his approach to working with his Republican colleagues:

“You treat them with respect, you try and focus on the common ground.”

…And that, folks, is how it’s done.

‘Just ask President Obama who is attempting to find some common ground with Iran in order to more effectively tackle our shared enemy, ISIS.  That doesn’t mean that he endorses anything else on Iran’s “to do” list.

Both are examples of judicious pragmatism; something that’s become dangerously rare.

So, here’s to those who dare sit down at the grown-ups table.

As so many have been wishing, Vermont’s intrepid state Auditor’s Office has just released its findings on the condition of Vermont Health Connect.  Though there is some improvement, the patient is still far from recovered.

The 62 page report looks at everything from IT to billing and oversight issues and concludes that the return on current investments depends very much on finally getting it right in short order.

“The State’s actions to address shortcomings of VHC’s IT governance have been notable,” Auditor Hoffer said. “A lot of people have put a great deal of time and energy into this undertaking. But the effectiveness of their efforts, and the value of the roughly $130 million spent on this project through the end of 2014, will not be realized unless planned improvements to the exchange are successfully released in May and the fall of this year.”

As painful as it is to witness the unravelling of the state’s first attempt at achieving universal coverage,  those who are truly committed to that goal should be the first to admit that badly administered half-measures do no good service to the desired end.  They just fuel the fires of opposition with smug ‘I told you so’s.’

While the Governor appears fully prepared to throw in the towel on Single Payer now that its siren song has served his purpose of leading the faithful once more to the polls, the future competitiveness of our sparsely-settled state depends very much on demonstrating our ability to solve this and other problems of modern living.  

If we can’t get it right, we will lose the positive distinction we have enjoyed as a pioneer state in public healthcare, just as we are in danger of losing any advantage we might have as a pioneer in clean energy.

Both areas of endeavor are being choked by cheapness.  

Unwilling to sell short-term revenue raises to the moneyed class for long-range gains in competitiveness, under the Governor’s leadership, we have disadvantaged another one of our signature economic initiatives (clean energy being the other) through hurried half-measures that contract-out key functions to the most attractive bidder and sacrifice effective oversight to the culture of sweeping public personnel reductions.

This rushed and poorly resourced plan hasn’t ended up costing us less; it has cost us much more because it is failing to be the program we need while creating backlogs and security issues that are paid forward to the next attempted “fix.”

Calling for a “cost-benefit analysis to explore alternatives” to the current system, Hoffer concludes the following:

“The financial controls of Vermont Health Connect’s premium processing system are seriously deficient,” Auditor Hoffer said. “The lack of financial reporting, account oversight, and a full validation of account balances is all very troubling.”

The window appears to be growing smaller and smaller for finally getting it right.

If the baby goes out with this bathwater, we’ll all have plenty to cry about.

In 1975 my sculptor husband, Mark Prent, was a Guest Artist in Berlin with the Deutsche Akademischer Austiuschdienst (DAAD.)  

Young and ‘green’ ourselves, we spent almost two years living and working in the colorful world of Cold War West Berlin where we met some of the artistic and intellectual luminaries of our time.

The DAAD organized numerous social events, concerts and exhibitions featuring their guests, many of whom never missed an opportunity to take advantage of the seemingly endless string of parties.  This proved the undoing of more than one promising career and a good many committed relationships; but that was not our story and so has no part in this one.

While in Berlin, we were under the informal patronage of a renowned American sculptor by the name of Ed Kienholz who reigned as the ‘king’ of Berlin’s international community of art ex-pats.  If you were anyone of creative importance, sooner or later you sat down at the dinner table or the card table with Ed and Nancy Kienholz. If you did so in 1975 or ’76, most likely we were there, too.

And that is how we came to be having dinner one evening with the celebrated authors Jerzy Kosinski (“The Painted Bird”) and Gunter Grass (“The Tin Drum.”)  

Jerzy Kosinski had been invited by America House, the American Cultural Mission in Berlin to be a guest speaker, and Mark was probably one of his biggest fans.  Ed hadn’t even heard of Kosinski, but Mark’s enthusiasm was contagious so the Kienholzs joined us that evening at America House.  

Now, Gunter Grass, we had met before.  He often came to the DAAD events, but I had been a little shy of finding myself in conversation with him because I had a guilty secret.  

When I was assigned “The Tin Drum” in college, I am ashamed to admit that I had found it simply too difficult a read and managed to skip huge passages while hitting only the high points and skimming my way to the end.

Following the lecture, Kosinski was absorbed in conversation with Gunter Grass, who also attended the event. Mark respectfully hung back, waiting for his opportunity to speak to the great writer, but Ed swept in and invited everyone to dinner as his guests.

We soon found ourselves at a large round table, surrounded by Ed’s entourage, with Ed on the opposite side of the table, seated between Kosinksi and Grass, who attempted to continue their conversation only to be preempted by Ed’s huge personality.

The rest of the evening, we hardly heard a word that was said by either author, because we were so far from the Ed-centric conversation group, and the din from the other guests simply drowned them out.

Mark was so disappointed, as I was for him; but once again, I was relieved not to have embarrassed myself with Gunter Grass.

I am of course, full of regret that my youthful uncertainty prevented me from having any kind of a meaningful conversation with one of the greatest authors of our time.

It is even sadder for me because my own focus was to resolve, too many years later, on some of the same big questions that appear to have routinely engaged the imagination of Gunter Grass even as we munched cocktail shrimp on either side of a DAAD buffet.

I was just too young, and still far too ignorant.  If we had actually had that conversation, I would have been wasting his time.

He would have undoubtedly listened politely, because he struck me as an unpretentious man who never held court as our dear friend Ed was inclined to do, for all his generosity.

Ed was literally larger than life and his mere presence caused a stir wherever he went, but Grass was as unobtrusive as his name; an ordinary man with an ordinary face partially obscured by a rather large mustache.

What we didn’t know about Grass in 1975, was his own rather more substantial guilty secret, which was only revealed to the world in 2006.

Gunter Grass, champion against revisionism in the German collective consciousness; Gunter Grass, anti-war activist;  Gunter Grass, liberal thinker; that same Gunter Grass, had been a member of Hitler’s elite Waffen SS.

Though his entry into the Waffen SS came only in 1944, at virtually the last minute of WWII, when he was still just a boy; and he is not suspected of engaging in any of the horrific acts for which the SS was infamous; the mere fact that he concealed this involvement for most of his life has made him the subject of vocal attacks.  

When, for instance, he ventured to criticize Netanyahu’s policies in Israel, as any one of us might, the consequences of his guilty secret served to amplify the righteous condemnation with which his opinions were met.

It now seems very likely that much of the understanding of guilt that drives his most compelling novels has come from a genuine place in his own personal history.  For me, that does not diminish his literary stature in any way. On the contrary, it actually helps me understand why I resisted what I misunderstood to be the intellectual challenge presented by “The Tin Drum.”

It wasn’t primarily intellectual at all; it was visceral; and I couldn’t possibly have appreciated from whence it came. Even if I could have done so, I don’t know that, in my own relative innocence, I’d have wanted to.

Anyway, while we were living in Berlin, we met a number of people who had lived there as children or teenagers at the end of the war.  Some had been conscripted into Hitler’s child army when the end was near; others had just been the cruel collateral of war and occupation.  All had been victimized in some way or another and each was haunted by his or her own confusing memories of shame, humiliation and confusion.  Without exception, all expressed a horror and dread that such crimes could ever happen again in Germany.  

I expect Grass’ backstory may not have been dissimilar to theirs.

To my mind Gunter Grass repaid whatever debt he owed to the world for the sins of his youth with a lifetime of painful introspection which he committed to the printed page on behalf of all the other lost souls who shared his terrible secret.

He died today in Lubeck, Germany at the age of 87, taking the only certain knowledge of what he experienced in 1944 to the grave with him.

May he now rest in peace.  

The saga of Patricia O’Donnell, who just announced her resignation from the Vernon Selectboard, unfolded a little off my radar.

I knew that O’Donnell, who chaired the Selectboard, was the recent subject of controversy after she attempted to intervene with the Sheriff’s department on behalf of a friend over a drunk driving stop.

I am no stranger to City officials who are inclined to abuse their authority, but this didn’t seem to rise to the level of particular interest for me.

It also didn’t surprise me that, as a member of the power elite in Vernon, she had been one of the biggest advocates to keep Vermont Yankee chugging away.

No juicy bits here, thought I.

Then I learned that, after retiring from office as a state legislator for Vernon,  O’Donnell had done a turn as a lobbyist in the statehouse for Entergy; ‘just the kind of “swinging-door” rep that we object to in D.C.

And why not?  A quick check of Sourcewatch reveals that O’Donnell also happens to have been the 2009 Vermont Chairwoman of ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, described thusly by Sourcewatch:

ALEC is a corporate bill mill. It is not just a lobby or a front group; it is much more powerful than that. Through ALEC, corporations hand state legislators their wishlists to benefit their bottom line. Corporations fund almost all of ALEC’s operations. They pay for a seat on ALEC task forces where corporate lobbyists and special interest reps vote with elected officials to approve “model” bills.

As a seasoned ALEC operative, O’Donnell must have grown so familiar with influence peddling that she quite forgot herself when her friend got pulled over for drunk driving:

At Monday night’s meeting, several Vernon residents questioned O’Donnell’s decision to bill the town for $5,000 to pay her legal fees associated with allegations of obstruction of justice into the Windham County Sheriff’s Department investigation of O’Donnell’s friend.

Her stated reason for resigning from the Selectboard? Why the departure of Vermont Yankee, of course!

O’Donnell apparently told the Rutland Herald that it had

everything to do with the tensions and economic fallout from the closing of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant, which closed last year, putting hundreds of people out of work.

O’Donnell said she was “fed up and tired” of the criticism leveled against her and other town officials from townspeople and other town employees whose jobs had been reduced as a result of the townwide belt-tightening.

Yes; don’t you just hate it when your neighbors get all up in your face over such petty infractions?

When I read the news in last night’s Messenger, the cast of characters seemed to step right out of the past for me.

Governor Shumlin has appointed St. Albans City Manager, Dominic Cloud to serve on the Natural Resources Board, which oversees Act 250 environmental regulations in Vermont.

As an alternate to the Board, he appointed former director of the Vermont Natural Resources Council (VNRC), and environmental champion, Elizabeth Courtney.

“I’m proud to appoint Dom to the NRB, and I am thrilled that Elizabeth will lend her expertise as an alternate member,” Shumlin said. “Both come to the Board with unique experiences and backgrounds but share a love for Vermont and a commitment to our land use goals.”

The appointment of Cloud as the full member and Courtney as only an alternate, couldn’t help but set my mental wheels in motion.

The Messenger story doesn’t even mention Jon Groveman, who now chairs the Natural Resources Board, but served for years as the tireless lawyer/advocate for the VNRC when Elizabeth was the director.

We who fought the battle to limit Walmart’s incursion into our little community feel a special affection for Jon, who even sacrificed his health to the long hours necessary for a single attorney to go up against the phalanx of lawyers the developer and Walmart brought to the table.

Cloud, on the other hand, was an old acquaintance of Jon’s from Dom’s time with the Vermont League of Cities and Towns.

When, in mid-appeal, while the City of St. Albans was still a party to Act 250 in opposition to the Walmart project, Dominic came on board as City Manager, Jon expressed optimism that Dominic would be good to work with.

I think no one was more shocked and disappointed than Jon when Dominic quickly negotiated a settlement with the developer and Walmart without even discussing it with us.  

Though we are no longer in touch, I have every confidence that Jon is still the same stalwart of environmental protection that he always has been and I suspect that he and our esteemed Governor have not always seen eye to eye over the fine points.

Dominic Cloud is a natural ally for Shumlin.  Both are ambitious, grandstanding machiavellians who, in their heart of hearts, probably consider Act 250 more of a hinderance than a help.  That they are acting out their respective careers in a state where environmental values still hold considerable sway is inconvenient, but not without its unique opportunities for exploitation.

When he assumed office as governor, Shumlin appointed more than a few people who could have potentially given him problems, to positions in his administration where they would be loathe to make waves.  

Exhausted by his years with the VNRC and optimistic about the new era of environmental engagement promised by the Governor, Jon Groveman understandably accepted a position with Natural Resources.

When, much more recently, a seat opened up on the Natural Resources Board, the Governor, having stumped for Walmart and repeatedly demonstrated his bias in favor of big development, would have opted for an ally to serve those interests.

I can just imagine Jon proposing the eminently qualified Courtney to fill the open seat on the Board, and Shumlin countering with an offer to make her an alternate, but only if Jon would accept Cloud as the full member.

Forgive my hard-earned cynicism; but that’s just the way it looks to me.

It’s almost routine now.

Escalating from a simple traffic stop, another unarmed black man was gunned-down today by a South Carolina cop who said that he ‘feared for his life.’

The people who insist that gun control is unnecessary because we don’t have a “gun problem” might want to consider the possibility that all of those police shootings of unarmed black men have as much to do with the assumption that everyone is “carrying” now as they have to do with the more obvious issue of racial profiling.

Even though, statistically, far more guns are in the hands of caucasians than black men,  somehow these (mostly southern) officers of the law simply assume that every black man who is reluctant to surrender to the tender mercies of Officer Friendly is getting ready to pull out a cannon and open fire.  

That they are reluctant precisely because Officer Friendly isn’t so friendly anymore, seems to evade the constables in question, over and over again.

However, in concentrating solely on the appalling truth that un-evolved attitudes toward race seem to persist in pockets all over the country, we may be overlooking an opportunity to make everyone, and especially young black men, much safer from these “accidental” shootings through a well-regulated system of gun control.

As things now stand, all Americans are well advised to bear in mind that there are 90 guns for every 100 people, so all of the strangers they encounter in a given day seem far more likely to be carrying than not.  

Of course the statistics do not take into consideration how many people own multiple weapons, and that the number of individual owners has been gradually declining over the past few decades.

But such subtleties are generally wasted on the police, who run a far greater risk than we do as civilians, of having a deadly encounter with a gun.

The anxiety this reality has produced in already poorly trained police is a recipe for disaster.

When combined with the bald racial prejudice that apparently remains pervasive in too many law enforcement bodies, it is enough to make being in the wrong place at the wrong time a deadly offense for far too many black men.

Here then, is another way in which the American cult of firearms has made an entire sector of society selectively even more unsafe.

Until American leaders have the courage to face down the NRA and insist on a reframing of the much abused Second Amendment that recognizes unregulated firearms as the threat to our freedom that they actually represent today, we will continue to have a hugely disproportionate number of senseless gun deaths when compared to Canada, Europe and nearly everywhere else in the civilized world.

I want to particularly direct attention to an article in Seven Days that discusses the obstacles that stubbornly persist in Vermont’s quest to clean-up our #1 water resource.

It represents a long and challenging battle to bring about some measure of progress while respecting the fact that meaningful improvements will depend on a change in our farming culture.  That will take time and a “buy in” from the farmers themselves.  

________________________________________________________________________

The headline this morning in the NY Times was no April Fool joke, much as we might wish that it were.

For the first time in it’s history, the state of California is imposing mandatory water restrictions, slashing local water supply agencies’ alottments by 25%. The agencies serve 90% of households throughout the state.

It will be up to the individual agencies to determine how this reduced volume will be rationed to consumers, but ration they must.

Farmers, who rely on sources outside of those agencies, will not be subject to the 25% reduction, but new rules requiring their accountability for usage have been imposed.

As the drought worsened, Governor Jerry Brown asked consumers for a voluntary reduction of 20% in January, but without the fines that a mandate imposes, strictly voluntary measures were insufficient to reach that goal.

This should be a wake-up call even to people as far away as we are here in Vermont.

As populations and standards of living grow in new places across the globe, energy costs and shortages will not be the worst resource problem we will have to face; and climate change pressures will only serve to make water more difficult to manage.

We’ve been fighting proxy wars over oil for decades now; water wars lie ahead.

It’s time to think about protecting Vermont’s groundwater for future generations.  It should be clearly established that water is a public resource and not for private exploitation.

If we don’t do that soon, we may live to regret it.

From our good friends at CERN, who brought us the Large Hadron Collider, and thereby a glimpse at the origins of the Universe, comes some very exciting news.

Researchers at the esteemed facility have succeeded in confirming the existence of the hitherto mythical “Force.”

Yes…that “Force.”

“The Force is what gives a particle physicist his powers,” said CERN theorist Ben Kenobi of the University of Mos Eisley, Tatooine. “It’s an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us; and penetrates us; it binds the galaxy together.”

But, as has been true with all consensus-shattering breakthroughs, this one was not without its fair share of politics and controversy:

Kenobi’s seminal paper “May the Force be with EU” – a strong argument that his experiment should be built in Europe – persuaded the CERN Council to finance the installation of dozens of new R2 units for the CERN data centre.

As if this thumb in the eye of North American and Asian research facilities was not enough to cast a shadow over the discovery,  ominous rumblings from rival projects threaten trouble ahead.

But the research community is divided over the discovery. Dark-matter researcher Dave Vader was unimpressed, breathing heavily in disgust throughout the press conference announcing the results, and dismissing the cosmological implications of the Force with the quip “Asteroids do not concern me”.

Details of the discovery and of what it might mean for the future of science as we know it, are far beyond my simple technical comprehension; so I invite my informed readers to visit Cern’s website and learn more about it from the researchers’ own words.

http://home.web.cern.ch/about/…

During the current legislative session, budgetary constraints have proven very challenging to representatives of all political persuasions, as each has struggled to reaffirm a commitment to the shared goal of lake clean-up without betraying key constituents.

One Republican legislator (who has requested to remain anonymous) thinks he/she may have hit upon the perfect solution that no one can afford to refuse.  That individual is apparently moving swiftly behind the scenes to “make it so.”

Even our Democratic governor has balked at raising revenue the old fashioned way, and you won’t see any Republicans arguing with him on that score.

Where then does a large, renewable pool of money exist that has not already been committed to essential services, and is simply wasted as it is currently dedicated?

When put this way, even I guessed the answer…campaign contributions!

Yes, “Legislator X” proposes that his colleagues agree to apply a “voluntary levy” to all campaign contributions made in support of state office seekers.  The office seeker him/herself would serve as ‘gatekeeper,’ and the levy would be calculated and paid into a public fund, based on the total value of campaign contributions, at the conclusion of the election cycle.

Republicans have already made noises about campaign finance reform that might drive a wedge between them and the national party, were it even aware that Republicans exist in Vermont.   What better way for the perennial underdog to assert its independence?

Proceeds from these voluntary tithings would go into a dedicated fund; now for lake clean-up; later, perhaps, for some other purpose ordained by the legislature.

The incentive to honor even a voluntary commitment to such a fund would be tremendous.  No one would want to be the asshole who refused to chip in to clean-up the lake, especially since, for all intents and purposes, affordability would have been removed from the conversation.

The exact details of how this would work and the legal mechanisms involved still have to be considered, but our source is confident that consensus on principle is near.  

A colleague from the Progressive camp is urging that the recommended contribution be established on a sliding scale, so that the more financial support a candidate receives from contributors, the larger his “gift” to the Clean Water Fund should be.

Under such a model, Governor Shumlin could expect to give the lion’s share, should he seek reelection.

This is what is so unique about our little state.

Where else besides Vermont would a Republican spearhead such a brilliant and…well…PROGRESSIVE strategy for raising new revenue?