Congratulations to the little town of Georgia for wisely recognizing the need to establish size limits on new retail development.  

In so doing, you place your community in line with the most forward-thinking planners, who already recognize that big box retail has had its day and will slowly go the way of the dinosaur, leaving behind concrete scars all over the countryside.

With this simple act, you reinforce your local economy and make a welcome statement about the importance to Georgia of maintaining human-scale development.

Dollar General, the national chain that is challenging Walmart as it expands rapidly and insidiously across the country, is in the process of locating a store next to the popular Georgia Market.  

The proposed 20,000-sq. ft. ceiling on retail would not have prevented  Dollar General from getting a permit for their modest 9,100-sq. ft. “entry” location; but arrival of the big box discounter certainly does add a sense of urgency to the mix.

Georgia, you have  wisely chosen not to wait until the wolf is at the door before making some serious decisions about how you want your community to grow.  

You have embraced a truth overlooked by too many towns when blindsided by big box suitors; that long term prosperity and livability for all of your citizens requires vision, planning and the courage to just say “no” to development projects that will irreversibly damage the character of your community.

Your children will thank you when they are spared the misery and expense of having to find new purposes for large scale retail shells once their original use has gone by.

They will thank you when visitors choose to come to Georgia for a unique shopping experience and the pleasure of bicycling, walking or driving through a community that has not been sacrificed to the demands of heavy traffic.

I will thank you by more frequently choosing to turn south on Route 7, rather than north, to continue my shopping beyond downtown St. Albans.

Okay; given how fond we all are here on GMD of gun diaries, I think it’s time to change the record and give everyone a new reason to rhumba.

Few people missed the news that Iowa is now permitting the legally blind to carry guns in public places.

According to the PR director for the National Federation of the Blind:

“Presumably, they’re going to have enough sense not to use a weapon in a situation where they would endanger other people, just like we would expect other people to have that common sense.”

The right of the blind to be treated no differently from sighted citizens is protected, they say, under the  Americans with Disabilities Act.  Who can argue with that?

Other states, Nebraska and South Carolina specifically, require “proof of vision” in order to purchase a gun.  Are they doing so in violation of the Act?

How about it? Have we finally painted ourselves into a constitutional box from which there is no exit?

But before you have fun with that, I have another little gun story that may have missed your attention but certainly makes the mind reel.

I refer to a page 7A story in the Monday Freeps, barely two inches of type, about a gentleman in Pine Bluff, Arkansas who engaged in a stand-off with a SWAT team after threatening two people with a gun.  

After the police evacuated the endangered couple, they announced their presence to Monroe Isadore, who was barricaded in a bedroom and immediately shot through the door.  The police returned fire, killing Isadore, who was 107 years old!!

I guess, when you’ve had enough bad service from your caregivers, you’ve really had enough; and it’s time to make a spectacular departure.

We have already engaged in some lively debate over the question of Syria, led by two excellent diaries by Jack McCullough, here and here; but the topic is by no means exhausted.  

Jack and I obviously feel strongly that bombing Syria would be a colossal mistake, but it was clear from the conversation that some are not so certain.

It is a difficult moment for the public conscience; especially so for those of us who hoped that the Obama administration would lead us away from entanglements in the Middle East.

I thought a visit to the most recent remarks made by our DC delegates, who have more-or-less sat gingerly astride the barbed-wire fence, was in order.

First, Sen. Leahy, who appears to be struggling with his usual role in support of the President’s agenda:

Next, Sen. Sanders, who is clearly not leaning the President’s way:

And finally, Peter Welch, who keeps it simple but echos the same fundamental question:

Will our intervention just make a bad situation worse?

That is the sixty-four thousand dollar question.  

While there’s still time to weigh-in, let our representatives hear it loud and clear:

War is not the answer.

Commenting on the “Old Gold” diary below, Witchcat raised the interesting possibility of taxing large-scale employers who routinely underpay their employees, for the burden they place on public assistance.  It is an intriguing idea that deserves stand-alone consideration.

With the largest Walmart in Vermont poised to open roughly one month from now in St. Albans; and the demand for public assistance in Vermont recently falling under criticism; it seems like an opportune moment  to re-consider funding of our “social safety net.”

While there are certainly many examples of malingerers gaming the system, the number of individuals genuinely in need shows no sign of declining; and it is on this need that we should be focussing.

The governor has proposed his own “rob-Peter-to-pay-Paul” solution to the deficiencies.  Witchcat may have hit upon a supremely just alternative.

The Job Gap Study, concluded in 1998 for the Peace and Justice Center by current State Auditor, Doug Hoffer, delved into the impact of systemically low-wage employment  on Vermont’s limited financial resources.  

I was reminded of the Job Gap Study by Auditor Hoffer, who kindly provided me with a link to some tables developed back in 2005 to illustrate the proportionate effect of different  large-scale employers on the public purse.  

What jumps out from the tables is the unmistakable evidence that, with just four stores in the state at the time, proportionately,  Walmart employees grossly outnumbered those of any other employer when it came to requiring public assistance just to get by.

The study went beyond evaluating Vermont’s economic well-being based simply on the percentage of individuals who are employed, introducing the idea that we need to track how many of the employed are actually earning a “living wage.”

It was a fairly novel approach at the time, which proved prescient as the fortunes of the “employed” continued to decline throughout the first decade of the twenty-first century and beyond.

The entire country is beginning to understand that no matter how low unemployment goes, we cannot hope to rebuild a middle class on poverty wages.

Companies like Walmart, whose business model is heavily dependent on deliberately underpaying workers, are subsidized by the rest of us through tax-supported social services that must make-up for the shortfall between what the company pays and the amount it takes to simply make ends meet in the current economy.

There is ample evidence of this effect, but consumers and lawmakers have so far failed to connect the dots in order to hold those companies accountable.

Attempts to collect data to illustrate the impact have, in the case of Walmart (and other large scale retailers who take their cue from the granddaddy of them all) been frustrated by the company’s refusal to share information.

The real volume of Walmart’s drain on public assistance programs may therefore be assumed to be severely under reported in attempts at statistical representations of this burden.  

Nevertheless, as in the case of the 2005 report, it has occasionally been possible to capture a representative picture through employment information volunteered by social services applicants.  

The overwhelming take away from all of this is that, setting aside for a moment the question of social services provided to the unemployed and disabled communities,  a huge opportunity to close the funding gap exists in simply demanding that large-scale employers either pay wages sufficient to lift their entire staff off of the public roles or offset the cost of that state burden through a targeted tax such as Witchcat has proposed.

You want to stimulate the economy?  Pay these folks a living wage.  They’ll get off of public assistance; and, unlike the 1%, whose wealth the governor would prefer to protect, they will actually spend that living wage in order to, you know… live?  

And a whole bunch of other indicators suggest that the social stability provided by earning a living wage will relieve a lot of the other hidden costs borne by the state when too many people are crushingly poor.

Let us put on our thinking caps, Governor; Ladies and Gentlemen of the Legislature.  

Wouldn’t this be a more strategic place to look for revenue than in the earned income tax credit of the poor?

At last, the penny has dropped!  After years of Chicken-Little-style lamentations about Vermont’s “aging population,”  the Free Press is finally recognizing a cup half-full.

The headline reads: “Age Wave Brings Jobs.”

Well, of course it does.  We’ve been saying that over here on GMD for years.

Enough of the perennial belly-aching of Art Woolf, the Douglas administration, and even the Shumlin echo; all of which would have us believe that without some miracle of deregulation, people in Vermont would go the way of the Catamount.

“Something has to be done about our aging population,” they would moan.

As a member of that aging demographic with a firm grasp of the inevitable, I think to myself with some alarm, “…And how the hell do you propose to do that?”

The predictable answer always comes straight from the Republican playbook: reduce taxes on corporations and the wealthy, slash regulations, replace working landscapes with box stores and trendy cityscapes.  

This, we are told, will “create” jobs, and young people will then be eager to move here.  

Yeah, sure; ‘nothing like moving across country to take a minimum wage job at Walmart and live in a place that looks exactly like the place you came from, only colder.

Finally, the Freeps has got it right: knowing and valuing our current population as the potential market it represents is the way to chart a course for economic prosperity and long term vitality in Vermont.

A coordinated effort by Vermont to develop rich and innovative ways to serve that market will not only enhance the quality of life for aging Vermonters; but it will also create jobs and new revenue for the state.

The people who are attracted to the state to serve its valued older population will bring professional and entrepreneurial skills.  Many will choose to settle here and raise their families precisely because of the ways in which the quality of life in Vermont differs from that of their home states.

The state will get a valuable infusion of youth and we need not follow the Catamount into extinction.

All of those old people and rural landscapes everyone has been so eager to “do something” about? They really are assets we can take to the bank.

So put away that shotgun, Henry.  It’s time to set Grandma on the front porch.

“The audactity of those fast food workers, asking for $15. an hour wages!”

You know they’re thinking it, even if that’s not exactly what they’re saying.

By “they”  I do not just mean industry employers.  A lot of Americans who make barely more than $15. an hour, or even a lot less, doing jobs outside of food service, are shaking their heads in irritated disbelief at the tremendous crust of those striking workers.

That’s because we have so bought into the invisible class system that has been successfully imposed on American labor that we don’t even realize we’re doing it.

It’s a system that’s worked like gang-busters for low-wage employers, lowering expectations for the vast underclass of manual and service laborers that now represent the majority of jobs in America.  In so doing, it has pitted worker against worker, isolating sectors of employment and effectively disabling efforts to unionize.

With that success at isolation, fast food industry giants and poverty employers like Walmart have seen their portion of the American economic pie grow exponentially, while the middle class has suffered a steady decline.

That decline in the middle class has further enriched low-wage employers by expanding their customer base with families who are no longer financially empowered to make other shopping and dining choices.

Those audacious minimum wage workers now demanding a living wage are really doing so on behalf of the majority of Americans who live paycheck to paycheck.  If their efforts are even halfway successful, and we see a federal minimum wage of $10. per hour (a figure that even the President has recently endorsed) the result will lift millions of families out of extreme poverty and set them in the lap of only relative poverty.

Why are they demanding $15. per hour, you might ask (an involuntary “tsk” escaping as you do)?

The answer is that they have taken a page from their employers and recognize that, in order to achieve on any level, you’ve simply got to overreach.  Success lies in the inevitable compromise; the “grand bargain.”

If they just asked for a minimum of $10. per hour, all negotiation would be built around the assumption that the point of agreement  lies somewhere south of that figure; and any gain would finally be insubstantial.

Laborers who see so little to gain for so much risk would be unlikely to join a walk-out; and that goes to the core of why many organizing efforts go nowhere in this crushing economy.  

Tired and intimidated as low-wage workers are, it takes an audacious effort, with eyes on a real prize, to mobilize their weary numbers.

It’s a gamble, but many believe its time is right.

The tired old arguments for not raising the minimum wage have lost their timber.  Growing income inequity boldly asserts itself at every turn despite decades of “trickle-down” declarations; and social media spreads the message far and wide.

What better place to start than in the fastest growing sector of the economy?  

Let’s have some fairness with those (heavily subsidized) fries; and then let’s go visit the local Walmart.

With Entergy announcing an end-date for Vermont Yankee, we have only a moment to shout “hurray” before returning to the ugly reality of decommissioning, and the likelihood that Entergy cannot be counted on to foot the bill.

As Arnie Gundersen has been telling us for years, there isn’t enough money in the decommissioning kitty to do the job.

Even though Entergy has satisfied the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s minimum requirement for the decommissioning fund, that is far from the end of the story.

One can safely posit that, given the Commission’s adopted mission as “industry cheerleader,” the $566-million minimum established by the NRC is a profoundly conservative figure which assumes an ongoing operation generating new revenues and allowing interest to build over a twenty-year span.  

After all, didn’t the NRC just re-up VY for another twenty years?  That must make it so!

Even without incident

Gundersen believes the cleanup will cost $250 million more than what’s in there now.

And if the worst should happen?  (from Seven Days)

Based on Gundersen’s experience decommissioning of other nukes around the country, he recommends that Vermont regulators remain diligent watching for underground leaks of radioactive material, including cesium, cobalt and strontium which are “incredibly difficult to detect from above.”

Such a leak at Connecticut Yankee, he notes, raised the cleanup costs by about $1 billion.

Ken PIcard of Seven Days quotes Arnie as saying,

“Let’s hope the stock market doesn’t collapse again,”

Let us, indeed; but even without a financial collapse, nuclear’s recently ascendant star appears to be on the wane, owing to market forces and loss of consumer confidence.  

Entergy, with its “slightly used” fleet of leaky, creaky reactors is among the most vulnerable.

This is the gang who can’t shoot straight.  Remember last year’s Superbowl blackout, courtesy of Entergy?  And how about the worker who was recently killed at Entergy’s Arkansas Nuclear Power Plant?

But I need not go on.  Have a listen to Arnie’s new podcast on the Fairewinds Energy Education website.  

While you’re at it, how about hitting that “donate” button, for all the advocacy work that remains ahead in order to ensure our safety from nuclear folly?

Kudos to the VNRC for taking a stand against the F-35 basing in South Burlington.  They have sent a letter to Mayor Weinberger and the City Council to that effect.

It’s tough to do, given our usually reliable DC delegation’s unanimous support for the siting;  but it is the right thing to do.

To their credit, the folks at the VNRC took a long considered look at the proposal before taking that position; and, in their statement,  they skipped the endless debate over sound-levels and went straight to the heart of the matter: sustainable communities, and what we must sometimes be prepared to do to protect them.  

We don’t need a fly-over to appreciate the impact of abandoned houses, where vandalism is the only sign of life.

Sometimes we forget that sustainable communities are natural systems as surely as those of fish, wildlife and the environmental building blocks that the VNRC is most often called upon to defend.

The VNRC argument focusses on the impact on affordable housing in the area and, in so doing, directs attention to the fundamental needs of the least among us.

Chittenden county can ill afford to sacrifice affordable housing; and those who would present the matter as a choice between job creation/job retention and affordable housing are playing at the same nasty game as the governor when he suggested raiding the earned income tax credit in order to fund early childhood education.

There are other options.  There are always other options.  Often they involve sacrifices by those who can most afford to make them but have the greatest opportunity to avoid the sacrifice.

Let’s see what you’ve got up the other sleeve, Gentlemen.

Only the ironically impaired will read about Walmart’s latest promotion without a smirk.

Walmart, we are told, is pushing “made in America” as its new theme.

Take shoes, for instance; in 1960, the U.S made 98% of the shoes sold in this country.  As of 2009, we were buying more than 90%  of footwear from overseas.

I think we can safely assume that the small amount of U.S.-made footwear that is sold in America is mostly stocked by medium to higher priced stores. Walmart doesn’t contribute much if anything to the less than 10% of footwear currently being sourced, and is unlikely to make a change in that department.

Even if the next ten largest retailers of shoes in America made a commitment to match Walmart’s U.S. representation in the shoe department, that still would barely move the domestic consumption needle on shoes and would certainly not bring shoe manufacturing back to the U.S.

If their commitment is to sourcing 1% of their products from U.S. manufacturers, isn’t it fairly safe to say that they could satisfy this figure almost entirely with food products?  In fact, I would venture to guess that Walmart is already satisfying the requirements of this very, very low bar.

So nothing ventured, nothing lost.  Meanwhile Walmart gets some warm and fuzzies from the mathmatically challenged press and then has the opportunity to double-down  on their rationale for buying “foreign” when, inevitably, it is more convenient to abandon the “made in USA” meme for “always low prices.”  

Nothing really changes about the business model, just the marketing strategy.

Walmart broke it, and Walmart ain’t gonna fix it.

Algae blooms choking St. Albans Bay are only a part of the bad news for water quality in Franklin County and Vermont as a whole.

Both the City and the Town of St. Albans are actively pursuing ambitious new development projects.  In so doing, they may be contributing significantly to the ill health of the Bay.

One of the principle developments in the Town,  a vast new  Walmart store and parking lot,  involves disturbance of a large tract of agricultural soil from which quantities of residual fertilizer have no doubt been “liberated” to find their way downstream.   Even when developers satisfy the letter of the law with regard to controlling run-off from construction sites, there is no such thing as “zero contributions.”

Local wisdom holds that we can build, build, build our way out of our economic troubles; and that parking places somehow equate to job creation (a principle which I am sure has never been embraced by serious economists.)  

Little is ever said about the impact of all this development pressure on our most valuable natural resource, since money has a powerful megaphone and water just burbles unobtrusively along.

Now, the honest effort by those who would act to protect the Bay has been dealt another serious  blow. A program of significant value in the fight against lake decline has come to a halt.  

Over town objections, flow gages were installed a couple of years ago in order to monitor the rate at which water (and therefore, the pollutants carried in that water) is entering the lake and from what sources.

The Town initially objected because they were concerned that accepting the monitoring meant some sort of obligation on their part….like, for instance, to do something about the phosphorus levels?  

Now the gages will cease to operate at the end of September, largely due to government cutbacks.  Not only will those gages be defunded, but so will a gage installed twenty years ago to monitor flow at the mouth of the Missisquoi River in Swanton. The Missisquoi is singularly important to the health of the entire Lake Champlain basin.

Flow data gleaned from the gages is paired with other data analyzing contaminant levels, so that effective policies can be developed to improve the overall vitality of our Lake.

As with all such efforts there are real economic benefits associated with a cleaner environment, but that is little appreciated by many officials, who live from election cycle to election cycle, concentrating on short term economics alone.

Unfortunately, I cannot link to the outstanding story filed in the Messenger by Michelle Monroe, which carries an informative history of monitoring efforts and the rise and fall of the program under a cloud of politics.

Vermont’s Clean & Clear played a significant role in securing the placement of the gages, but that effort was not without its local challenges.

Suffice it to say that when the Tea Party rails against earmarks, it is this sort of program that often gets the axe. Without a Leahy sponsored earmark, which initially required the U.S. Geological Services to pay for the gages, they very likely never would have been installed and we would not have the benefit of data that they have already collected.

Once that earmark had been pulled in 2010, the U.S.G.S. continued to pay for half of the monitoring, and the Lake Champlain Basin Program, using funds from the Great Lakes Fishery Commission paid for the rest. They also helped to support monitoring of some locations in New York State.

It appears that GLFC is no longer able to make that contribution, so all the of the monitoring will have to end.

And that’s a shame, because the health of the Lake was never in greater jeopardy than it is now, with development pressures and climate change worsening an already critical situation.