What’s this we hear about the Lake Champlain Regional Chamber of Commerce getting preferential treatment over other regional development associations in the form of a $100,000. grant earmarked for the purpose of sweet-talking Quebec businesses in what are described as “outreach efforts?”

The appropriation started out as a $500,000 fund for marketing Vermont as a good place to do business. That amount shrank to $200,000 during conference committee, and the Quebec outreach proposals appeared in the waning hours of the session as a $100,000 appropriation. The money comes from the Vermont Enterprise Fund, which was originally intended as a cash incentive for the IBM sale to GlobalFoundries but was never used for that purpose.

So, in other words, a slush fund created to groom private economic interests from abroad appears to have been opportunistically hijacked by the Lake Champlain Regional Chamber of Commerce before the rest of the boys were even given a peek under the hood.

What surprises me is that this comes as any kind of a surprise to  Tim Smith of the Franklin County Industrial Development Authority.  

Mr. Smith objects to what he correctly sees as an unfair advantage negotiated by the LCRCC, and a lack of transparency in the process.

All I can say is welcome to my world, Mr. Smith.  

In the broader world of politics, the Chamber is not known for playing fair.

And while we are on the subject of local Chambers of Commerce, why are we still allowing them so much unfettered influence on the business of business in Vermont?

The answer is probably that they have become so insidious in small town America that we hardly notice they are here.  

Most Vermonters completely overlook their connection to the soulless Mother Ship of Greed: the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a powerful global economic player which just this past week was excoriated by the New York times for engaging in an organized effort to combat  anti-smoking efforts around the world.

Already infamous for their efforts to discredit Climate Change science, the Chamber is also the champion of the tobacco industry as it faces off against expanding health education that is making it more and more difficult to ply this killer trade even in third world countries.

Three years ago, Ukraine filed an international legal challenge against Australia, over Australia’s right to enact antismoking laws on its own soil…Taras Kachka…argued that several “fantastic tobacco companies” had bought up Soviet-era factories and modernized them, and now they were exporting tobacco to many other countries. It was in Ukraine’s national interest, he said, to support investors in the country, even though they do not sell tobacco to Australia.

Mr. Kachka was not a tobacco lobbyist or farmer or factory owner. He was the head of a Ukrainian affiliate of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, America’s largest trade group.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce derives its power from the sheer number of small local and regional affiliates that unify under its name.  It is their passivity with regards to the Chamber’s overarching agenda of  anti-Climate science and pro-smoking that allows it to continue against the forces of both education and common sense.

When the state awards funds to even a minor agency of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, it becomes complicit with their appalling agenda.

Until local and regional Chambers rise up and conspicuously disassociate themselves from the Mother Ship, they will get no quarter from me.

What’s this we hear about the Lake Champlain Regional Chamber of Commerce getting preferential treatment over other regional development associations in the form of a $100,000. grant earmarked for the purpose of sweet-talking Quebec businesses in what are described as “outreach efforts?”

The appropriation started out as a $500,000 fund for marketing Vermont as a good place to do business. That amount shrank to $200,000 during conference committee, and the Quebec outreach proposals appeared in the waning hours of the session as a $100,000 appropriation. The money comes from the Vermont Enterprise Fund, which was originally intended as a cash incentive for the IBM sale to GlobalFoundries but was never used for that purpose.

So, in other words, a slush fund created to groom private economic interests from abroad appears to have been opportunistically hijacked by the Lake Champlain Regional Chamber of Commerce before the rest of the boys were even given a peek under the hood.

What surprises me is that this comes as any kind of a surprise to  Tim Smith of the Franklin County Industrial Development Authority.  

Mr. Smith objects to what he correctly sees as an unfair advantage negotiated by the LCRCC, and a lack of transparency in the process.

All I can say is welcome to my world, Mr. Smith.  

In the broader world of politics, the Chamber is not known for playing fair.

And while we are on the subject of local Chambers of Commerce, why are we still allowing them so much unfettered influence on the business of business in Vermont?

The answer is probably that they have become so insidious in small town America that we hardly notice they are here.  

Most Vermonters completely overlook their connection to the soulless Mother Ship of Greed: the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a powerful global economic player which just this past week was excoriated by the New York times for engaging in an organized effort to combat  anti-smoking efforts around the world.

Already infamous for their efforts to discredit Climate Change science, the Chamber is also the champion of the tobacco industry as it faces off against expanding health education that is making it more and more difficult to ply this killer trade even in third world countries.

Three years ago, Ukraine filed an international legal challenge against Australia, over Australia’s right to enact antismoking laws on its own soil…Taras Kachka…argued that several “fantastic tobacco companies” had bought up Soviet-era factories and modernized them, and now they were exporting tobacco to many other countries. It was in Ukraine’s national interest, he said, to support investors in the country, even though they do not sell tobacco to Australia.

Mr. Kachka was not a tobacco lobbyist or farmer or factory owner. He was the head of a Ukrainian affiliate of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, America’s largest trade group.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce derives its power from the sheer number of small local and regional affiliates that unify under its name.  It is their passivity with regards to the Chamber’s overarching agenda of  anti-Climate science and pro-smoking that allows it to continue against the forces of both education and common sense.

When the state awards funds to even a minor agency of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, it becomes complicit with their appalling agenda.

Until local and regional Chambers rise up and conspicuously disassociate themselves from the Mother Ship, they will get no quarter from me.

10 Rulings The New Lib-Er-Al Supreme Court Will Come Up With Now That Ruth Bader Ginsburg Has Been Baking Pot Brownies:

#1–They will reinstate the Voting Rights Act, with even tougher language, and appoint the NEW BLACK PANTHERS to enforce it.

#2–Citizens United? No, Corporations are NOT people!  Fuck ’em! (“These brownies are really tasty, Ruth.”  “Thank you, Tony.  Have some more.”)

#3–The voting age will be lowered to 16.

#4–People will have the right to make citizens arrests of the police.  (“Man, Ruth…what did we just rule?  Hanh?”  “It’s okay, Jack.  Here, eat another brownie.”)

#5–The Confederate Flag may only be displayed by people or groups with a special permit on Halloween Night.

#6–Term limits for U.S. House members will be 4 terms; for U.S.Senate, 2 terms; and for Supreme Court Justices, 10 years.  (“Yeah, well I’ve been getting kind of tuckered-out lately, Ruth.  Whoa…what’s IN these brownies?  Whoa…Can I have another?”  “Sure, and pass them to Clancy, Tony.”)

#7–The Patriot Acts, The War On Drugs, The War In Afghanistan, Fracking, SUVs, Dress Codes, and not deferring to seniors walking with canes will be declared Unconstitutional.

#8–People over 50 will not have to pay any taxes, and taxing the Rich as much as possible will be considered a civil right and civil ‘duty’ of the people.  (“Hey, Ruth, I think this is a pubic hair in my brownie.”  “YOU FUCKING MORON ASSHOLE!  Shut up and eat it, or you’ll be eating my fist!”  “Okay, okay, Elena.  Jeez…I was just trying to…”  “SHUTTHEFUCKUP PIG!  EAT IT!!!”)

#9–Sexual harassment in the workplace or any place will be a felony punishable by chemical castration for men and counseling and paid vacation time for women.  Also, it will be the job of the FBI and Homeland Security to investigate any and all ‘conspiracies’ to commit sexual harassment, as defined by the ‘conspiracy parameters’ in the recent decision handed down in BUKNATSKI v EVERYBODY.  (“Now…wait a minute…did we…what was the vote on…who wrote the…ah shit…pass the brownies.”  “Tony ate the last ones.  Tony…Naughty.”  “Ah chill, Ruthie.”)

#10–Marihuana, health care, day care, utility bills, public transport, fresh water, and vegetable and flower seeds will be provided free by the appropriate government agencies.  There will be no laws applicable to marihuana as a ‘cigarette substitute’, nor may any state, municipality, district, neighborhood, school, church, or co-op attempt to restrict the people’s right to smoke marihuana and/or cigarettes when enjoying drinks at their favorite ‘club’ or gin mill while peaceably plotting the overthrow of the U.S. government, as is their right as citizens, immigrants, visitors, and the born and unborn of all races, mixed races, all genders, and mixed genders residing in the United States and its territories, or in vacation spots around the world which American males gather in because the legal age of consent in said vacation spots around the world is 14.

“We so rule, today, June 29, 2015.  Court is adjourned.  Ruth, is that what I think I smell in the oven?”

Peter Buknatski

Montpelier (Sensitiveville), Vt.

Well all the King’s Horses and all the King’s Men finally caught up to David Sweat, so that’s all she wrote.

To those who would not, Republican, Democrat and Progressive, one can only ask WTF?

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There are so many things happening right now that not all receive sufficient attention on GMD.

Our model is extremely democratic, so the array of topics reflects the impulse of the moment rather than the gravity of a single subject weighted against many other equally important ones.

A cavalcade diary might be in order, touching on some of the news that fell between the cracks over the past week or so.

The Dannemora prison escapees, or rather the one remaining escapee, continues to make daily appearances in the news, although the expectation that authorities were “within hours” of capturing David Sweat seems to have lost some of its cache, as it has been repeated now for what seems like days on-end.  

I see that digital pop culture has more or less institutionalized the prison break du jour with its own Wikipedia page.  

Not much is being said about the unsustainable nature of America’s current incarceration habits.

It should be little surprise that as we grew the corrections industry to gargantuan size by incarcerating more people than any other country in the world, we also opened the door to the kind of qualitative decline in skilled labor that tends to accompany a “Big Box ” management model.

The details of this escape by truly dangerous criminals from the ‘honor block’ of a famous maximum security prison should lend a lot of credence to the argument that we need to ratchet down our legal system to focus on successfully incarcerating the truly dangerous people under skilled supervision, and stop tossing every petty drug offender in the clink. It may have generated a highly profitable business for the corrections sector, but it’s actually making us less safe for reasons too innumerable to go into here.

Talking about the need for major changes in America’s institutions, that great Agent of Change for 2016, Bernie Sanders is gaining on Hillary Clinton in the New Hampshire polls.  I believe the spread is down to eight points now and closing.

Bernie’s secret? Consistent messaging since roughly 1972.  

In an era when Americans are tired and cynical and fully aware that big money controls most political conversation, they like what they’re hearing from Bernie because he says what he truly thinks, not what the latest polling says he should think, or what the deepest pockets say he must think.

Which is not to say that Hillary isn’t authentically progressive in her heart of hearts, but her exceptional talent and intellect was unfortunately appropriated by conventional politics (and a significantly less intelligent and disciplined husband) far too early in her own career to enable her to soar far above the fray as Bernie now can.

Change seems to be in the air in even more traditionally conservative arenas, as the Supremes hit two out of the park last week. That followed recent addresses by Pope Francis that both elevated Climate Responsibility to a moral obligation and gave nuclear energy a thumbs down, referring to it as a “Modern Day Tower of Babel.”

Unfortunately, in Franklin County, Vermont, owing to a lack of leadership by the Vermont Senate Pro Tem,  John Campbell, and the hierarchy of the  Vermont GOP, a necessary change is proving stubbornly difficult to achieve.

Accused sex offender, Norm McAllister, continues to resist calls from his constituents to vacate his senate seat.

Mr. McAllister, as you may recall, has been recorded by the State’s Attorney’s office discussing his grotesque behavior with a couple of his ‘alleged’ victims.  Details of the calls, as partially recounted in the St. Albans Messenger and other sources were extremely graphic and left no doubt in the mind of the reader, that McAllister owned the involuntary nature of the sex acts committed against his accusers, even if he was unwilling to stipulate to their criminal implications.

The recordings also left no doubt that he was in violation of his oath of office, at the very least.  That is why it is incomprehensible to many (probably most) Franklin County residents why he has been allowed to continue claiming his seat in the senate.

Fed-up with the lack of leadership, several Franklin County ‘civilians’ have taken it upon themselves to begin a petition on Facebook and on paper, asking Mr. McAllister to voluntarily resign.

I am one of the people who is collecting signatures on paper in support of the petition, and on Saturday alone, I personally collected close to 100 signatures without breaking a sweat.

I might add that those are all signatures of Franklin County adults, and I had to refuse a number of people from Quebec and Chittenden county whom I encountered who would have dearly loved to sign, too.

Well, that’s all I’ve got for the moment… stay tuned for updates.

We can move forward in time again, to United States v. Windsor exactly two years before Friday's decision, when, in another Kennedy decision, the Court held that the Defense of Marriage Act was unconstitutional. In dissent again: Roberts, Thomas, Scalia, and Alito.

  And now it's back to today, and today's landmark decision. The dissenters again, in ever more extreme, emotional language: Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, and Alito.

What they demonstrate, both by their abandonment of any pretense of legal reasoning for pure vitriol, and by their consistency, is that what offends them is not any legal or jurisprudential principle, not any concern for the role of the courts or the balance between state and federal laws. No. They just can't tolerate any limitation on what can be done to gay people. Whether it's the threat of criminal prosecution in Lawrence, the unequal application of state antidiscrimination laws in Romer, or the unfair and unequal application of federal estate tax laws in Windsor, these guys are forever on guard to make sure that lesbians and gays can never be full members of society.

 That's what was at issue today, and the culminating (though perhaps not final) achievement of full acceptance of our lesbian and gay friends, coworkers, and family members is as inevitable as it is sweet. 

Oh yes, and one last thing: it's not “gay marriage” or “same-sex marriage” anymore. “Marriage” works just fine. 

I am posting Brian Shupe’s excellent op-ed on GMD in its entirety, for the benefit of our readers.  No one could have made the case more eloquently.  Brian Shupe is the Executive Director of the Vermont Natural Resource Council.

Most Vermonters are aware that the state recently enacted ambitious legislation aimed at cleaning up Lake Champlain and other lakes and rivers. At the same time, many state leaders are talking about putting a price on carbon-based fuels to account for the true cost of these increasingly dangerous energy sources.

Despite this good news, we’ve got a problem. Just across Lake Champlain, in New York, poorly-regulated oil trains rumble along old rail lines and bridges just yards from the shore, posing a serious threat to the lake and the communities that surround it.

Recently, representatives from the National Wildlife Federation, Vermont Natural Resources Council, the Adirondack Council, the Sierra Club, and the Lake Champlain Committee, stood on the banks of Lake Champlain in Port Kent, New York, just yards from a Canadian Pacific railway line, and issued a sharp warning: a spill or explosion along Lake Champlain could be a major environmental disaster and an unprecedented tragedy for area residents.

Currently, trains of the black tankers – so called DOT-111 cars – carry tens of millions of gallons of crude oil from places like North Dakota along this line, just across the lake from Burlington, to Albany. Much of that oil is highly volatile Bakken crude. Bakken crude was what caught fire in July of 2013 when a train derailed and exploded in southern Quebec, killing 47 people and gutting downtown Lac Megantic (pop. 5,900) just a few miles from the Maine border.

So far this year, there have been train accidents and associated crude oil fires and spills in West Virginia, Illinois, North Dakota and two in Ontario.

 

The domestic oil boom in the U.S. and Canada has got trains running like never before across the continent. According to the Association of American Railroads, between 2008 and 2013 the number of carloads of crude oil shipped rose more than 40-fold, from about 9,500 carloads to 407,761 carloads. In the first half of 2014, railroads moved 229,798 carloads of oil.

As should be expected, the increase in rail transport has lead to an increase in accidents. In 2013, more crude oil (1.15 million gallons) was spilled from train accidents than was spilled in all of the years between 1975 and 2012 (800,000 gallons) combined.

So far this year, there have been train accidents and associated crude oil fires and spills in West Virginia, Illinois, North Dakota and two in Ontario.

Now, a Massachusetts-based firm, Global Partners, has proposed adding a heating and pumping facility to an oil storage and transfer plant it runs in Albany so that the plant could heat Canadian tar sands oil – that nasty, climate-busting stuff that comes from Alberta and really should stay in the ground – so it could be more easily shipped.

The plan would clear the way for the same train line to carry this heavy oil that is strip mined from vast stretches of boreal forests into the market. Mining and then burning this oil is pumping massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, so much so that former NASA climatologist James Hansen said that if Alberta’s tar sands oil is extracted and burned, it will be “game over for the planet.”

Some argue that slowing oil-by-rail shipments will increase the pressure for pipelines, like the Keystone XL Pipeline, or the use of the Portland Montreal Pipeline that runs across the Northeast Kingdom. That notion is based on the false assumption that we have no choice but to double down on dirty fuel, digging it up and hauling it around in ever-greater quantities. For the sake of the climate, clean water, and the safety of our communities, we’ve simply got to phase out our addiction to fossil fuels. Throttling back – not up – is the only option.

Specifically in terms of shipping oil by rail, NWF has called for an immediate moratorium on shipments until safety can be guaranteed. VNRC agrees. Given the progress we are making on cleaning up Lake Champlain – and the growing urgency to deal with climate change – allowing this threat to remain, indeed grow, makes no sense.

Vermont’s State Auditor Doug Hoffer has been taking a close look at how we spend some Corrections (DOC) dollars on transitioning prisoners back to civilian life.

Will it surprise anyone to learn that we aren’t managing that very well?

What we learn from the Auditor’s report is that in 2014 the state paid roughly $6 million dollars to 25 organizations charged with providing transitional services to about 1,000 departing inmates; roughly $6,000 per inmate.

The Auditor’s Office was interested in how well the providers were satisfying the terms of their grants, in three specific areas:

.Were the organizations developing individual plans of services for each client?

.How was the DOC determining the effectiveness of these service interventions?

As it turns out, returns on that $6-mil investment are impossible to assess because the organizations charged with inmate transition often have failed to develop individual plans for their clients, and they often failed to provide accurate or supported reporting on the services they had provided.

The audit was provided as a follow-up to a 2013 investigation that centered around a non-compliant provider.

The 2014 audit found that often, individual service plans were not even being developed by some contractors.

“DOC’s program management was ineffective in this area,” Auditor Hoffer said, “and there were no consequences for grantees that failed to develop these plans.”

“Without accurate reporting, the State cannot adequately monitor this program to determine its effectiveness and compliance with the grant agreements,” Auditor Hoffer said.

Without detailed plans, recording of services and accurate reporting to the DOC so that it can assess how effective these services are in addressing public safety issues and recidivism, the Department’s investment may be substantially wasted.

The audit makes 11 recommendations to improve this program.

It was predictable, I’m afraid, based on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s record of industry-driven decisions, but allowing Entergy to dip into its Vermont Yankee Decommissioning Fund to cover the costs of onsite spent fuel management was extremely irresponsible.

The total amount of the diversion will be $225. million, or roughly one-third of the existing nest egg.

Neil Sheehan, a spokesperson for the NRC, said the regulators approved the exemption because Entergy is investing the $665 million fund well enough that the company will have enough money to decommission the Vernon plant over a 60-year period. The total cost of decommissioning will likely exceed $1 billion.

The decision appears to have been based almost entirely on Entergy’s  own calculations that  it will have accumulated ‘plenty’ of money to accomplish decommissioning within the required sixty year timeframe, even with substantial diversion to fuel management costs.  They are calling for nothing but sunshine and roses in Entergy’s long range financial forecast of how they intend to grow the fraction of that cost that is represented by the amount that is now in the fund.

Of course, Entergy’s history of reliability is famously deficient but that doesn’t seem to have given the NRC any pause for reflection; neither has the fact that Entergy’s calculations are based on a final decommissioning cost (roughly $1.2 billion) that is now understood by many to be significantly underestimated.  The cost is likely to grow higher and higher, the further in the future decommissioning actually occurs.

To appreciate the NRC’s bias in this matter, one has to understand that when the decommissioning fund was established, spent fuel management was expected by both the NRC and Energy to be a short-term affair, with a federal spent fuel repository anticipated in the near future.

It is a matter of extreme inconvenience for the NRC, which is unofficially captive to industry interests while still being nominally a federal agency, that getting any state with acceptable geology to accept a role as the ‘final resting place’ for some of the most dangerous material on earth has been stubbornly elusive.

Despite the fact that the NRC insists on its absolute prerogative on any matter of nuclear safety, it has proven to be a rather poor steward of that responsibility, issuing exemptions to the industry, left-right-and-center, while rarely heeding requests from the public (who actually must bear all risks when it comes to safety) to enforce the rules.

Entergy has even mislead the NRC on occasion; still they are given the benefit of the doubt in a fiduciary matter (growth of the decommissioning fund) that allows full credence to energy’s own captive analysts who insist that raiding the decommissioning fund represents no possibility of shortfalls at the end of the line.

Apparently the NRC has a short memory and simply does not recall the rather broad hint given by Entergy that if decommissioning takes more than sixty years, they expect a court battle with the State of Vermont over who pays the outstanding costs.

Apparently, the NRC places its whole faith in the stock market’s ability to hit the jackpot more often than it goes broke.  At this point, any pensioner might be wiser than that.

Anyway you look at it, Vermont’s future with Vermont Yankee is shaping up to be a gamble with some rather unsettling odds.

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As always, I must disclose that I am pleased to be associated with Fairewinds Energy Education in a nontechnical capacity; but the opinions shared on Green Mountain Daily are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect those of Fairewinds.

“You rape our women and you're taking over our country.”

 He was known to make racist jokes.

He posted a picture of himself with a Confederate flag license plate and the flags of the racist Rhodesian and South African regimes. 

He drove over a hundred miles, through areas thick with churches, to find one that was predicably occupied by black people.

He sat with the people in the church for an our. 

Yet, somehow, the motivation is a mystery to the Republicans.

Jeb Bush:  “I don't know what was on the mind or the heart of the man who committed these atrocious crimes.“

Rick Santorum:  “you know, you talk about the importance of prayer in this time and we’re now seeing assaults on our religious liberty we’ve never seen before.”

Carly Fiorina:  “We ought not to start immediately rushing to policy prescriptions or engaging in the blame game.”

Donald Trump:  “The tragedy in South Carolina is incomprehensible.“

Rick Perry:  “Anytime there is an accident like this, the president is clear: He doesn’t like for Americans to have guns, and so he uses every opportunity, this being another one, to basically go parrot that message.”

Seriously, this goes beyond the standard moral obtuseness we see from the Republican Party. A politician who absolutely refuses to admit that the motivation of this attack was racism, and who abolutely refuses to consider the role of guns in this kind of terrorist act, is a monster.

I turned on the news yesterday morning in delicious anticipation of the furor that was bound to run through the pack of Republican presidential contenders in the aftermath of Pope Francis’ much anticipated encyclical on climate change.

Instead, I discovered that, once again, America’s attention had been hijacked by a bloodbath.

Only in gun-happy, “post-racial”  America could a domestic act of mass-murder be so egregious and yet so entirely without contextual meaning as to completely overshadow what could be considered the most historic demonstration of ethical leadership by a sitting pope in history.

As the environmental community was poised to watch the fireworks from Francis’s ground-breaking pronouncement, a callous kid who appears to have never done a useful thing in his entire life, chose that particular moment to exercise his “constitutionally protected” right to bear arms in deadly conjunction with his “constitutionally protected” right to free speech, no matter how hateful; thereby mowing down nine of the most socially valuable people he could possibly have found in a single room.

Of course, that is all that we can now talk about in this country.

We’re not ready to have a grown-up conversation about anything, it would seem, having relinquished all power of attention to the violent offender of the moment.

And that is precisely why we keep getting more and more selfish, evil demon spoor like Dylan- whatever-his-name is.  I refuse to look it up on Google.