It’s a dirty job but someone’s gotta do it.  Someone’s got to beef up revenues when the Governor won’t ask the wealthy to contribute more.  

That someone is usually the poor who can be depended upon to buy their guilty pleasures retail and fork over the “sin tax’ that the rich are so good at avoiding.

Am I talking about the Shumlin administration’s forays into sin-tax “social services,” like the proposed soda levy?  

No, in this case, the Governor in question is Republican Sam Brownback of Kansas who made a hash of the state’s finances with massive tax cuts, and now seeks to remedy the problem; not with the obvious strategy of reversing the tax breaks that bought him support from his wealthiest constituents.

Instead, he proposes to exorbitantly tax the very things that poorer folks often depend upon for comfort, thanks to the combined efforts of the tobacco industry to foster addiction, and life on the margins, which has been known to drive the desperate to drink.

Apparently “tax” is only a dirty word when it threatens the growing nest egg of the privileged class.

The  Kansas Governor’s quick fix is meeting with resistance in the Legislature, even from the occasional Republican:

“He’s proposed some revenue enhancements that I think the Legislature will have a great difficulty passing,” said Senator Susan Wagle, the chamber’s Republican president. “That’s [a] tax increase.

Well…yeah!

But that’s not the only way Brownback proposes to punish the working class of Kansas for his own folly:

Rather than retreat from the massive tax cuts that are crippling his state’s finances, Gov. Sam Brownback (R) wants to cut classroom funding for Kansas schools by $127 million and push pension fund payments off into the future.

That’s pretty uncomfortable company for Governor Shumlin, when we can draw a parallel in his policies to a Republican governor who is even too regressive for his own caucus!

Kudos to my favorite cartoonist, Jeff Danziger for applying some down-home humor and killer logic to snatching New Hampshire’s golden goose right out from under her nose.

“Live free or pie!”

declares Danziger in his delightful Washington Post op-ed, which was picked-up by Seven Days.

Danziger reasons that, since the Granite State has writ into law that New Hampshire shall hold its primary before that of any other state, the best way to outfox them and grab some attention for us, their infinitely more deserving neighbors next door, Vermont’s legislature has only to make it a rule that our primary will be held concurrent with the New Hampshire primary, no matter on what day that might fall.

In the spirit of generosity so characteristic of Vermont, Danziger suggests that it would be even better if Maine and Massachusetts followed suit with Vermont and held their primaries the same day.  A regional primary would make all of New England much more relevant in the early days that shape campaign messaging.

After all, our old timers can be just as crusty and colorful for the national media as those of New Hampshire and we could sure use the extra commerce at our diners and truck stops.

Who knows? Deprived of their lucrative singularity in the primary department, maybe New Hampshire would rethink the whole “Live Free” thing and start trying to raise some revenue through…oh, I don’t know…taxes?

Probably not, but we can dream.

It would be nice to not have our governor looking wistfully eastward all the time.

More or less as a public service, this is just a quick reminder that The NRC is accepting public comment on Entergy’s decommissioning plans, for a limited time only.

Digger has posted links to the report and provided the following information:

The full text of the report is available through the NRC website.

The NRC will host a public meeting on the report from 6-9pm on February 19 at the Quality Inn in Brattleboro.

In the meantime, the public can submit comments online through www.regulations.gov using Docket No. 50-271, or by mail to Cindy Bladey, Office of Administration, Mail Stop: 3WFN-06-A44M, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Washington, D.C., 20555.

Public comments will be accepted until March 23.

After a relatively brief interval of useful service, Vermont will live with Vermont Yankee’s radioactive legacy for (at minimum) many more decades; perhaps even centuries.  This is our best chance to weigh-in on how we think that legacy should be managed.

When I read that the new Free Press publisher Al Getler is

…a prolific public speaker – and a ventriloquist

I didn’t want to be the last to observe that this could be a valuable skillset for someone who appears poised to preside over a more or less empty newsroom.

Posessing the ability to project his voice all over the place, perhaps he can mimic the collegial atmosphere of a legitimate newspaper.

‘Might not be enough to fool the readers, but could disguise what is likely to be quite an echo in the ol’ Gannett garage.

Makes you wonder why they wanted to move to a new location barely a year ago:

“The high-tech, new location will put all of our employees in open spaces, helping all of our departments build off of the energy of others. There will be increased communication among editors, reporters and photo staff working arm’s distance from one another.”

Right.  

If you think NAFTA was a good idea, you’ll love what the secretive Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement has in store for us!

Apparently, corporate bigwigs have been heavily involved in crafting this new backdoor to greater profits for themselves and to job erosion, environmental damage, security risk and political mischief for the rest of us.

And we might never have known the details until after it was signed into law if folks like Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren and Vermont’s Independent Senator Bernie Sanders hadn’t raised the alarm.

The Senator wants to know more about the terms that are being discussed and why these are not being publicly shared.  He also questions the process which has given major corporations, both domestic and international, a seat at the planning table, but has excluded consumer advocates and even elected officials such as Senator Sanders, who apparently only learned some of the details through leaked documents.

In a letter to U.S Trade Representative Michael Froman, the Senator expresses outrage with the process and demands, on behalf of the American people, greater tranparency and opportunity for input.

“It is incomprehensible to me that the leaders of major corporate interests who stand to gain enormous financial benefits from this agreement are actively involved in the writing of the TPP while, at the same time, the elected officials of this country, representing the American people, have little or no knowledge as to what is in it,” Sanders said in the letter.  “In my view, this is simply unacceptable.”

Without a draft of the proposed agreement, it is impossible to know exactly what it entails, but corporate watchdog Public Citizen offers a handle on what it appears poised to do:

• offshore millions of American jobs,

• roll back Wall Street reforms,

• sneak in SOPA-like threats to Internet freedom,

• ban Buy American policies needed to create green jobs,

• jack up the cost of medicines,

• expose the U.S. to unsafe food and products,

• and empower corporations to attack our environmental and health safeguards.

The Obama administration seems determined to push this trade agreement through in what recalls for me the Clinton betrayal of Amercian labor with NAFTA.

It’s as if the corporate puppetmasters move in to claim their pound of flesh while everyone’s attention is otherwise engaged.

Not surprisingly, we learn that Mr. Froman held “senior positions” in the Clinton administration:

A California-born lawyer who has known Mr. Obama since they were classmates at Harvard Law School, Mr. Froman, 52, exudes a genial charm. But it masks a relentless drive that propelled him from senior posts in the Clinton administration to a career at Citigroup, where he earned millions of dollars before resigning to join the Obama administration.

The “Good Ol’ Boys Club” strikes again.

Indeed, Republicans are more likely to support the agreement than the President’s own party.  

We can only hope that their persistent recalcitrance over anything on the President’s agenda will see them holding the line against the TPP.  That may just be wishful thinking because business trumps even politics, and really BIG business really wants this to happen.

Perennial reactionary, John McClaughry has his tail in a knot over the possibility that the Legislature might consider a statewide carbon tax.

He so routinely comes out on the other side of reason that I hardly noticed this late December rant until I came across it again yesterday.  What leapt out to grab my attention was the number of words and phrases Mr. McClaughry chose to frame in quotes.

As no links or references were provided, one must assume that these do not represent actual quotations, but rather ideas held by others that he deems pretty fanciful:

Why…we must defeat “climate pollution-the biggest environmental challenge of our generation.”

They profess to believe-and some may actually believe – that human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide are giving us “super storms and extreme weather events.”

His tortured phrasing suggests that Mr. McClaughry may have never even bothered to crack a book on climate science.

He appears to have been equally insulated from practical knowledge of low-income Vermonters, at one point referring to them as “the poor” (his quotation marks), as if he doubts their very existence.

On the other hand, McClaughry is crisply clear on who the enemy is: VPIRG and the evil folks who would lead Vermont down the path to renewable energy.

Ten percent of the revenues will be skimmed off to pay for “investments in energy efficiency, renewable energy, and other clean alternatives to fossil fuels.”

There he goes again with those phantom quotation marks..

Apparently he has no problem with public investment in fossil fuels and nuclear for energy production, for which there is much precedent, but draws the line at clean renewables.

The rest is just the usual whinging about how doing anything to encourage a reduction in fossil fuel use is bad for business and will make everyone go to New Hampshire to pump gas.  

McClaughry ends with a sort of left-handed valentine to Peter Shumlin who has turned out to be more of an ally to his privileged cohort than ours.

If I were the Governor, that prospect would give me something of a chill.

It’s list making time again, and I thought it would be interesting to hear from the GMD community about what they thought were the best and worst days of 2014.  

I leave it to you how many days make your list, and whether it should be worldwide, national, statewide, local or entirely personal.

There is a lot to choose from, so I’ll start with a couple of obvious and recent picks for the state:

Worst:  December 17, 2014- Governor Shumlin gives up on single payer healthcare for Vermont.  

This could arguably be a “worst” day for the country as a whole, since it was hoped that Vermont would lead the way, providing a working model for the rest of the country.

The public outcry from his former supporters made for a day that could compete on the Governor’ own “worst” list with Election Day, November 4, 2014; a day that would no doubt  be right at the top of many a Democratic and Progressive candidate’s list, thanks in large part to the dampening effect the Governor seems to have had on voter turnout.

Best:  December 29, 2014 –  After 42 years of operation, once and for all, Vermont Yankee finally powers down completely,

That’s the low hanging fruit, plucked from nearby and most immediate memory.

What springs to your minds?

Here’s hoping the “good” days outweigh the “bad” in 2015.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

I’m a little behind the curve this month, but I have one final question to pose before the New Year.  It goes out to my fellow Progressive, Tim Ashe:

Why in heaven’s name did you nominate Dick Mazza to yet again chair the all-powerful Committee on Committees?

It certainly couldn’t be because he is so uniquely qualified to make committee assignments.  

Appointing Bob Hartwell, a climate change denying Republican to chair the Natural Resources and Energy Committee in 2013 does not speak well of his judgement in such matters.

If certainly couldn’t be a reward for Mazza’s loyalty to the Democratic/Progressive agenda,  as he has energetically come out for Brian Dubie, Phil Scott and other Republicans as they challenged Democratic/Progressive hopefuls and incumbents throughout the years.

Mazza has already had more than his share of opportunities to chair the C on C, so it can’t be for reasons of good sportsmanship.

There has been quite a history of speculation on Green Mountain Daily about why Senator Mazza’s persistent disloyalty and ideological peculiarities haven’t already disqualified him, years ago.

You should know that some folks will inevitably see a connection between your inexplicable endorsement of Mazza and your own appointment by the C on C to the

plum post as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee.

So I’m putting it out there for a reasonable explanation.

I hope you have one.

We cannot let this day pass on Green Mountain Daily without mention of the shutdown of Vermont Yankee.

Many will heave a sigh of relief that, after a stressful decade of mysterious leaks and other concerns, the flawed reactor will go out with a whimper rather than a bang.

I am among that number but recognize the hard work and dedication of the VY staff who made it so despite engineering issues and management obfuscations.  Some of those folks are now looking for other employment, but many others will be retained for site security purposes and decommissioning over the coming decades.

That being said, I am far more grateful for the tireless effort of the many dedicated activists who never relented in their quest to shut the place down.  That VY finally closed for economic reasons is sweeter still, as it bears out one of their chief rebuttals of the “public benefit” argument.

In reflecting on VY’s closure, Leslie Sullivan Sachs of The Safe and Green Campaign (and coincidentally, my colleague at Fairewinds Energy Education), made the following observations:

“Obviously, the legacy is decades of radioactive waste no one wants to take responsibility for – not the owners, not the federal government, not the state,”

“That beautiful strip of former farm land on the river, right in a village, will be a sacrifice zone,” she said. “Maybe a swath of it will be declared a nature preserve someday, like they’ve done at other nuclear waste sites. It helps folks forget the waste left behind.”

And she points to the following lens through which we can view the impact of VY’s closing on most Vermonters:

* 2010 Independent Survey: Two-thirds of Vermonters say Yankee should shut down.  Overall, 71 percent of state residents are “less supportive now of Vermont Yankee, the nuclear reactor, than [they] were six months ago.” That includes 57 percent of Republicans, 82 percent of Democrats and two thirds of Independents.

• Given a choice, fewer than one in 10 Vermont residents (9 percent) would ask their power company to use nuclear energy to power their homes, compared to 71 percent who selected “wind, solar and other clean-energy technologies.”

• The fact that Entergy has been unable to find the source of the tritium leaks makes more than three out of four Vermont residents (76 percent) “less confident in the company’s ability to safely manage a nuclear reactor”.

Having generated electricity for considerably less than a single adult’s lifetime,  Vermont Yankee will go on menacing the environment with its radioactive by-products for centuries, and the unconcealed location of its nuclear waste stockpiles will remain a temptation to terrorists until some distant future date when space can be created for it in an underground repository.

That’s quite an outsized negative payload, even if it can’t be measured in carbon units.

I’ll leave it to others to do the number crunching, but I would hazard a guess that when all the subsidies for construction, all the liability costs absorbed by taxpayers, plus the billions in future costs for decommissioning and waste management are factored in,  those brief years of useful service  hardly measure up as adequate return on public investment.

It’s an appropriate moment to reflect on the impulses that brought us down this particular garden path, and for that we must look to the end of World War II and the start of the Cold War, when “Atoms for Peace” served the twin interests of propaganda and proliferation.

The meme of “mutually assured destruction” justifying an unending arms race emerged.  At almost the same time, the Atomic Energy Commission got busy repackaging the persistent nightmare of Hiroshima into the modern housewife’s happy helper.  The military/industrial complex was born.  

Who’d have guessed that less than half-a-century later the primary threats to our security would come not from conventional states, but from a multitude of rogue agencies, completely oblivious to their own destruction and fully prepared to unleash doomsday should the opportunity present itself?

Who’d have guessed that, within the same half-century, all that prosperity fed by cheap energy would become too much of a good thing and we would find ourselves knee-deep in waste and planetary destruction, grimly regarding the possibility of our own extinction?

The answer is: precious few.

As always, the views expressed in this diary are my own alone and do not necessarily agree with those of Fairewinds Energy Education.

It’s the holiday season and our astute readers deserve a hearty ho-ho-ho at least once in a while.  When this little gem crossed my desk I knew it was just the thing.

Released in 1966 to sell nuclear energy to a presumably gullible New England public, “Atom & Eve” is a rich repository of political incorrectness and shameless propaganda.  If you’re looking for that perfect ironic Christmas gift, this is the baby for you (copies offered for purchase at the above link.)  

They seem to have been pretty oblivious to the contradictory narrative of what happened when Adam (Atom?) took a bite of that apple!

Have fun with this and see how many examples of “Oh my God!” moments you can identify.  My family was in stitches.