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.  

(The final tally is 110 to 69 in favor of Governor Shumlin. – promoted by Caoimhin Laochdha)

From VPR:

http://www.vpr.net/audio-playe…

It’s the senate button on the bottom.

Crossposted on The Vermont Political Observer.

There’s an absolutely devastating piece on VTDigger this morning. If you haven’t read it, go. Now.

For those who didn’t immediately take my advice, the story outlines the role Governor Shumlin played in holding a pillow over single payer health care’s face until it stopped breathing. Or, as the headline says, “Shumlin built ‘lead airplane’ for single payer.”

If the story is true, here’s basically what happened. At some point, the governor decided that he couldn’t win on single payer. Then, rather than face the music directly, he larded his single payer proposal with assumptions that added to its cost and suppressed its revenues. As the story says, “he cast the program in the most negative light possible.”

And then he walked away.

After the jump: the grim details.

How did he do it?

Well, first of all, he presented only one plan, when he’d promised a menu of options.

Aside from that, his plan offered top-shelf coverage, paying for 94% of clients’ health care costs – a 94 Actuarial Value. He could have gone with a lower figure; “Act 48, Vermont’s single payer law, directed the administration to shoot for a plan that covered 87 percent of costs.”

So he ignored the law. Not much new there.

The 94 AV added $300 million a year to single payer’s cost.

He also chose to add out-of-state residents who work in Vermont, which added another $200 million. And he called for the elimination of Vermont’s provider tax, which cut $160 million in revenue.

He also chose to assume the new system would yield no administrative savings – which had been one of his big selling points for single payer.

You can see where this is going. Shumlin projected a first-year cost of $2.6 billion, but he could have brought in a perfectly acceptable plan for well under $2 billion.

And he knew it. And he chose not to tell us.

The massive report released by the administration at year’s end included not one, but 15 plans. But Shumlin chose to present only one.

Among the 15 different models in the document dump is Financing Concept 12, which uses an 87 percent actuarial value and would require $1.6 billion in state revenue for the first year.

It excludes out-of-state workers and does not offer supplemental coverage to federal employees or people with employer sponsored coverage, all of which is contained in the plan Shumlin chose.

It’s hard to read that and feel anything other than betrayal.

Maybe there were perfectly sound reasons for Shumlin’s choices, but he didn’t give them and he didn’t provide any options. Instead, he “buried” them in his pre-holiday document dump.

So, Vermont misses a chance at single payer. Even worse, the entire idea of single payer has been significantly set back, perhaps by decades. Because now we have a liberal governor, a strong advocate of single payer, concluding that it’s not practical.

This hurts.

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.

While single payer planning in Vermont is down, dormant, or perhaps dead for now, longtime opponents have come in to deliver a few more kicks to the comatose near-corpse. So who are the sharks circling in on the state’s plans for single payer healthcare?

One of them is Shawn Shouldice, the Vermont director of the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB). Under her direction, the Vermont branch of the NFIB is sending out over a thousand postcards urging small businesses to pressure legislators to repeal the single payer provisions in Act 48, the healthcare law. The NFIB bills itself as a “non partisan” business group, however VtDigger.com politely notes they are “a business group which has largely endorsed Republican candidates and causes”

CNN reported in 2013 the single biggest source of funding for the NFIB came from a group backed by the Koch brothers’ political empire.

NFIB and its affiliated groups received $2.5 million from Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, a conservative advocacy group with deep ties to the Koch empire.

 Other sources reported that several years ago Karl rove’s super PAC Crossroads GPS gave the NFIB a grant of $3.7 million.  

Actual small business people politically are divided in roughly equal thirds between Democrats, Republicans and independents. Yet the NFIB lobbies heavily in favor of big business and conservative Republican political issues. So, while claiming to be the voice for small business, the nationwide group carries plenty of baggage for big time national conservative funders and the corporados whose interests they serve.

Shawn Shouldice, the NFIB director, wears several hats. In addition to owning Montpelier-based Capital Connections lobbying firm, she has worked as spokesman for Bruce Lisman (small businessman?) of Campaign for Vermont the “centrist” group. Shouldice is also co-chairman of the Vermont chapter of ALEC – a nonprofit organization of conservative state legislators and private sector representatives.

At ALEC meetings, corporate lobbyists and special-interest reps work with elected officials to approve “model” bills for their legislative wish lists. These bills focus on reducing environmental and corporate regulation and taxes, tighten voter ID laws, and combat single payer healthcare. NPR calls ALEC a dating service between corporations and politicians.  

I wonder if the NFIB-initiated postcard shower might be intended to make waves at Lt. Gov. Scott’s Capitol Plaza business/legislator gathering. Scott has called his upcoming Priority #1 Day One gathering a combination “Shark Tank” show and speed dating event. Interestingly enough he envisions his Vermont pitch session will perform a match-making service strikingly similar to the one ALEC provides – a dating service between conservative business and their well-funded pocket politicians.

Besides Scott Milne I mean. It’s finally down the wire for Scott Milne’s long-running campaign for Governor. And he may be one of only a few Vermonters who see his odds of winning election improving.

In his most recent comments Milne says:

“I’m open to a conversation with anybody, Vermonters large and small, legislative or nonlegislative,” Milne told The Associated Press in an interview. But he added, “I’m not going to be proactively calling legislators and twisting their arms.”

Years of legislative precedent and a Democratic/Progressive majority will favor incumbent Governor Shumlin when the vote to settle last fall’s too-close-to-call election is held this Thursday. The November vote was Shumlin 46.4 percent of the vote to Milne’s 45.1 percent.  

Ever since Milne’s surprisingly close finish, the general consensus has been that it would be very, very, very, very unlikely if not impossible for him to win election for governor in the legislature.

A lone supporter from the newly formed group Vermonters for Honest Government bought a TV ad attempting to target legislators. However Milne’s newest burst of optimism doesn’t appear to be connected to actions he himself has taken or any discernable trends.

And he’s not exactly workin’ the phones!

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.

Mario Cuomo died today. It's not surprising that a man of 82 dies, but it's a sad loss anyway, because of the eloquence of his voice for the progressive values of the Democratic Party.

His Tale of Two Cities speech at the 1984 Democratic National Convention lays out the differences between Ronald Reagan's Republican Party and the Democratic Party that we here at GMD are working for. 

Truly, the only difference between the Republicans of Reagan's day and of today is that they've gotten even worse.

Listen to the whole speech.

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!