Writing by Jonathan Leavitt: November 2010

Thursday, November 18, 2010

Police Chief Schirling on Panhandling (11/17/2010 Public Works Committee Meeting)

Background:

New York Times Op-Ed Is It Now a Crime to Be Poor

7 Days Are Vermont's Pols Severing the Social Contract with Vermonters?

http://www.7dvt.com/2010get-out-town

http://www.7dvt.com/2010get-stand-burlington-wants-make-sidewalk-sitting-crime

http://7d.blogs.com/blurt/2010/05/sidewalk-sitting-ban-proposed-in-burlington.html

http://7d.blogs.com/blurt/2010/06/sidewalk-sitting-ban-nixed-in-burlington-for-now.html

Please express your concerns regarding the curtailing of basic freedom of association and assembly for low income Burlingtonians to the three members of the Burlington City Council Ordinance Committee:
Bram Kranichfeld (up for re-election in 2011) (D)
338-1992
bwkranic@yahoo.com

Sharon Foley Bushor (up for re-election in 2011) (I)
658-3604

Joan Shannon (up for re-election in 2011) (D)
860-7489
jshannon@burlingtontelecom.net

Monday, November 15, 2010

Me, Peter Shumlin and the Snelling Surcharge at a Dive Bar

Originally published on Green Mountain Daily
August 22, 2010

Wednesday night was a crazy mix of dive bars and Gubernatorial candidates. I walked around the corner to bohemian coffee shop/restaurant Radio Bean to see my Argentinian friend Lucas on his last night in here Burlington. Noticing Peter Shumlin, Democratic candidate for Governor, across the bar, I realized this was the perfect opportunity to ask him a question his campaign staff had been unable to answer for me. Shumlin was on the move though, so I followed him to the OP, the dive bar next door. After letting my anthropological imagination devour the sight of a Gubernatorial candidate work the hipster, American Apparel clad, dive bar set for a bit, I dove in, asking his position on raising revenue via the Snelling Surcharge (a means of raising revenue by temporarily raising taxes on Vermont's tip-top income earners to prevent the laying off of teachers, state workers, mental health employees and many other vital social services that keep our state running. Conservative deficit hawks like Republican Jim Douglas and Brian Dubie are quick to cut these middle class jobs in financial downturns, so as to preserve low tax rates for the ultra-rich).

Shumlin said that "we can't squeeze VT's most affluent much more," that taxes on them have already "been raised from 6% to 10%." I recounted to him how taxes on VT millionaires have been slashed from paying $150,000 on $1 million dollars in earned income in 1968 to under $60,000 on $1 million in 2010. Shumlin maintained those were federal taxes and re-iterated his original claim that the most affluent in Vermont can't pay any more. Clearly at an impasse, we segued in a discussion lameness of DC Dems. Ironically, he mentioned how Dems on the Federal level need to tax the wealthy instead of just sitting their with their "[slang for male genitalia which I see no reason to repeat here] in their hand." At about this point I realized close talkers, like Shumlin, make me really uncomfortable, especially when employing locker room vernacular. After he asked me what I do. I told him that for the past 8 years I worked in Mental Health, and that there was an awful "brain drain" effect due to stagnant wages and budget cuts, and that the suffering of our most vulnerable is going to increase until we raise revenue. He tried to find common ground around revenue shortfalls, talking about his own dyslexia, kids with learning disorders being disproportionately locked up and how he would free up some $60 million annually for mental health and other social services vis a vis releasing non-violent offender and de-criminalizing marijuana. Some ten minutes later it was all over, a very weird window into the final days of this seemingly endless Democratic primary.

I looked into tax rates to fact check Shumlin's numbers. Here's what I found:

* The top marginal tax rate was reduced when state lawmarkers got rid of (most of) the 40% capital gains exclusion; overall, this change will result in some very high income Vermonters paying more but nothing like the 1960's.

* He was mistaken about the federal vs. state issue (those reductions resulted from changes in federal & state taxes but the result was a huge decline in state tax liability).

* The key is how much they pay as a percentage of income (this is referred to as the effective rate); on average at present, the wealthy pay 5.3% for Vermont state income taxes; to say there is no more capacity is far from a fact, it's an opinion. Shumlin was probably referencing the top marginal rate. One of my criticisms, among many, of the way Douglas talks about taxes is his constant flood of soundbites regarding Vermont's 9 or 9.5 percent top marginal tax rate. Because it only applies to taxable income over about $347,000, many high income Vermonters pay less in income taxes here than they would in other states that have lower top rates that kick much sooner than Vermont's. To see a Democrat seemingly taking a page out of Douglas' middle class eroding playbook is disappointing to say the least.

All that said, as friendly and giving of his time Shumlin was I'm really troubled that he wouldn't make the most affluent in our society share the burden equally in this worst economic crisis since 1929. What's almost as troubling is the degree to which Shumlin misrepresented the taxes paid by Vermont's most wealthy in order to close the door on a share-the-burden-fairly initiative like the Snelling Surcharge.

Perhaps not coincidentally Peter Shumlin would be directly be affected by the Snelling Surcharge, his federal tax return shows he and his wife had an adjusted gross income of an eye-popping $947,732 in 2009 (Burlington Free Press, 4/20/2010). The Shumlins' annual haul is just a little less than 5 times the amount Google Exec, and fellow Gubernatorial candidate, Matt Dunne makes. According to the same article, the other candidates salaries range from $95,969-$198,435. Not to put too fine a point on Shumlin's own vested self-interest in this, but he loaned his own gubernatorial campaign $225,000, or more money than any of the other candidates make in a single year. None of the educators or state employees I know, who have lost their jobs due to revenue shortfalls, can loan themselves a quarter of a million dollars to help themselves attain a new job. But then again, those individuals, and their corresponding professional organizations don't support Shumlin's candidacy. Instead they choose to support the one candidate from either party who has gone on record saying he would raise revenue to preserve vital social services, Doug Racine.

I've been torn between voting for Shumlin and Racine for months now. They both share many of the strengths I'm looking for in moving Vermont forward after eight years of Jim Douglas. Both would close Vermont Yankee and enact single payer health care. After going to debates, scrutinizing their campaigns in the media, I never thought my decision would be made amongst the buzzing neon, pint glasses and popcorn of my neighborhood dive bar. This beer soaked tableau almost certainly wasn't the setting Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis was thinking of when he made the famous quip that States were "the laboratories of Democracy." Then again, here in in this small state of 621,760, the first one to outlaw slavery, and the first to sign civil unions into law, perhaps it isn't entirely surprising after eight long years of Jim Douglas's slash and burn economic agenda, people are ready to push politicians for economic justice from dive bar to Statehouse and back again, and I'll gladly raise a toast to that.

First Listen: Arcade Fire - The Suburbs

Originally Published on Burlington Music Journal

July 25th, 2010

From the titular opening track Win Butler and Co. situate their third album inside the schmaltzy/menacing signifiers of a Terry Gilliam dystopian suburban nightmare: connector highways, explosions, and adolescent ennui. Half syncopated tin pan alley piano cul-du-sac muzak/half thought police kicking in the front door to burn the books. At first blush it seems like a tired indie rock fatal conceit, Songs about the Corrupt and Fetid Modern World: Urban planning gone horribly awry, hyper-consumerism, daily violence, and nostalgia for a distant, idealized, rococo past. Arcade Fire c. 2010 are able to make it all cohere, equal parts Jane Jacobs and Bruce Springsteen, White Flight references and rhythm section rave ups.

In an age of where there are few bands taking principled stands, pulling off a 60 minute song cycle overflowing with permutations on lines like, "Business Men drink my blood." is no small feat. Clearly the band has a lot on its mind. Perhaps the now seven member band is uniquely positioned to put out an album the synthesizes the bedroom community indie blues of Funeral and the strident "Antichrist Television Blues" social critiques of Neon Bible. There is none of their sophomore LP's sonic or thematic overreach here though, no black mirrors, no lighthouse metaphors, no neon bibles. The sound of The Suburbs: immaculately crafted yet effortless hooks, brilliant orchestral swells, one gets the feeling the arrangements are so you could sing anything over the top of them.

"I feel like I've been living in /A city with no children in it"

An arresting hand clap/telecaster hook serves as an apt foundation for standout track "City With No Children" and its Steinbeck-esque imagery, "A garden left for ruin by a billionaire inside a private prison." Whether the title's referencing of Amelie director Jean-Pierre Jeunet's grimy, dystopian City of Lost Children is incidental or intentional remains an open question. What is certain though is that few bands in the post-Goldman Sachs and friends torching the global economy era can elicit such strong feeling singing about dollars and cents. Butler casts himself in Citizen Kane fashion as the billionaire in the private prison in songs final movement (Or perhaps Daniel Day Lewis' fallen King Lear from There Will Be Blood's Shakespearean fifth act). Given the band's success and their -not quite Gates-like but impressive nonetheless- philanthropy, it's a cleverly effective rhetorical flourish. Taking vocal duties for fourteen of the sixteen tracks, The Suburbs clearly represents Win's close-up. His sometimes Boss-like baritone delivers, imbuing an emotional weight to which keeps you listening, even if you don't give a good goddamn about the world at large.

"When we watched the markets crash/ The promises we made were torn"

Album centerpiece "Half Light II (No Celebration)" is the sort of spacious, "big a Anthem," quiet/now rock!/now quiet again song Arcade Fire built their 7 piece collective name on. It begins with a foreboding drone but soon gives way to their familiar speedball of steady floor tom rhythms, and and a choral troop harmonies. By the time the horns kick in the songs final third, the song's Red State/Blue State tension has given way to "the death of everything that's wild." The song aptly evokes America 2010's zeitgeist of hyper-partisanship, great recession, war weariness and coastal salt marshes littered with dead brown pelicans floating in BP's oil. "When we watched the markets crashed" isn't the sort of irony steeped lyric one expects from contemporary indie rock.

Indeed, much as Contemporary American Poetry shed biting commentary for personal lyricism in the final decades of the twentieth century, anglo guitar rock shed the social commentary of the 1970's and early 80's in favor of obtuse scatological verses propped up with whatever emotional weight singers could infuse them with. Sasha Frere-Jones eviscerated this trend in the pages of the New Yorker as a "flat-footed mixture of shaggy, improvisational rock and sylvan curlicues taken from obscure folk groups." Bands from Death to TV on the Radio have long since broken down Frere-Jones' over-simplified racial lines of avant-guitar rock with something to say being as providence of caucasians.

Mountains Beyond Mountains

A cavalcade of bloggers have already rehearsed the unlikely partnership that was forged for Superbowl XLIV: that song from Where the Wild Things are, Haitian Earthquake relief, Regine Chassagne and the NFL. Regine, who's originally Haitian, and the rest of the band, funneled the $1 million licensing payout into Partners For Health, one of the leanest, most effective NGO's on the planet. It's perhaps not coincidental that one of Regine's only lead vocal tracks on The Suburbs, "Mountains Beyond Mountain" shares its title with Partners in Health founder Paul Farmers' biography. Rather than vignettes from the wreckage of Port-au-Prince, its lyrics detail the phenomena of feeling overwhelmed playing the part of representative Haitian amongst the white noise of Montreal's urban glut and blurt: "Cause on the surface the city lights shine/they are calling at me, come and find your kind" and "I need the darkness, someone please cut the lights." It's a prescient reminder that pale suburban ennui is perhaps over-represented in our first world mediatized culture, while underrepresented the developing world's everyday corporate globalized poverty devours on. It's an interesting choice to skew global so late in an album so focused on the First World 'burbs.

For all the heady idealism it references, "Mountains Beyond Mountains" is the rare false step as band stretches their sound into a weird pseudo-Blondie sounding coldblooded new wave. It isn't the only moment on The Suburbs' b-side that sounds as though the focus and lyricism has gotten a little shaky. "Month of May," for all its kinetic fuzzed out bass line, again leaves one itching for A-Side's lyrical highlights, as Win takes easy shots at "Kids with their arms folded tight." So they're guilty, as are so many bands, of cramming a couple too many of their Orwellian songs onto a single album. Had the second act been winnowed away to only include it's most vital tracks, and the album would have a more fulfilling dénouement, one worthy of its most compelling songs. As it is, The Suburbs will instead be merely one of the best albums of one of the best years in music in some time.

In some looking forward/looking backward Brechtian way, this album is like a homecoming. It's at once familiar and yet it's new. One finds oneself trying to place The Suburbs inside constellation of great Guitar Rock Social Commentary albums: The Clash's self titled debut, Gang of Four's Entertainment!, The Boss' Greeting From Asbury Park, Radiohead's OK Computer. Albums that serve as the "invisible legislators" Shelly wanted poets to be, albums that, long past their respective release dates, serve as ways of triangulating the overarching mood of an age for backward looking armchair philosophizers and public intellectuals. It's familiar, emotional territory to be sure, but in a time of overwhelming strife, coming home to the Suburbs just feels right.

Post-script: Apparently the Terry Gilliam reference from the first paragraph proved prescient, as he filmed a live concert movie for Arcade Fire's inaugural stop of their tour this fall.

People Power Versus Lobbyists in the Health Care Debate

Originally published on Toward Freedom
Re-published on ZNet, Sea Change, National Economic and Social Rights Initiative,

At the center of the national debate are figures like Max Baucus, head of the powerful Senate Finance committee, who's received more contributions from the health care industry than any other member of congress: $3.9 million since 2003.(1) The same Max Baucus has been hosting $10,000 a head chicken cordon blue dinners for lobbyists in his palatial San Francisco mansion, while average Americans seeking real health care reform protest outside.(2) When doctors and nurses advocating for single payer health care were blacklisted from Baucus' May health care hearings, they stood in silent protest in the gallery and Baucus had them arrested.(3)

Perhaps it wasn't entirely surprising to health care advocates then when the AP reported Monday: "After weeks of secretive talks, three Democrats and three Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee were edging closer to a compromise that excludes a requirement many congressional Democrats seek for large businesses to offer coverage to their workers. Nor would there be a provision for a government insurance option, despite Obama's support for such a plan, officials said."(4)

There is a certain irony in the fact that Senators who have tax payer-subsidized universal health care are stripping the health care reform bill of a public insurance option. Meanwhile, a recent NY Times/CBS poll poll found 72 percent of Americans favor a public option.(5)

Can Vermont Lead the Rest of the Country to Health Care Reform?

A world away from this pay-for-access system of influence auctioning, the state of Vermont has begun it's own, and decidedly more grassroots, health care debate. Instead of millionaire lobbyists, the leading voices are small town health care providers like Dr. Deb Richter. Richter has practiced medicine for the last 23 years as a primary care physician in Cambridge, VT, population 3,186. Asked to describe the health care system in the US she says, "I feel like I'm in the foxholes. People are getting angry, they're absolutely livid about the bailout for the banks - this apparent bailout for the insurance industry - while they are struggling to pay for shoes for their kids to wear. The people are are ready for single payer, the people have have had it, Medicare looks pretty good. Patients are saying I can't wait to get old. The majority who get sick can't work, I see them all the time in my practice. I kind of smell a revolution coming."

Buttressing Richter is a recent report from the NY Times which found that "an estimated three-quarters of people who are pushed into personal bankruptcy by medical problems actually had insurance when they got sick or were injured."(6) As for the prospects of the House and Senate crafting a policy solution, Dr. Richter says, "I don't expect this [public option] to solve the problem if this isn't going to be implemented until 2013, this is going to be a calamity."

Asked for her critique of the debate happening inside Washington, Dr. Deb explains, "Our democracy is corrupt; it is not a true democracy. The debate started with including the insurance industry and that's why single payer was immediately off the table. I don't think the public option is going to solve the problem, the public will pay for the sickest people and the private will pay for the healthiest. Single payer would get an immediate cost savings, an immediate effect. A recent national study found that with single payer we could spend five percent less of our GDP (Gross Domestic Product) on administrative waste. In order to do single payer you virtually eliminate the insurance industry, but they the subsidize congressional campaigns."

Health Care is a Human Right

On May 1st of this year Richter spoke at a Health Care is a Human Right rally of approximately 1,000 people at the Statehouse in Montpelier, Vermont's usually sleepy capital of 8,000. The Vermont Workers' Center organized the rally and is building "a grassroots network to fundamentally change how we approach health care as a basic public good, as a human right," says its director James Haslam. The Vermont Workers' Center desribes itself as a "democratic, member-run organization dedicated to organizing for workers' rights and living wages for all Vermonters."

"There is so much suffering and there is so much injustice that we are going to keep organizing our tails off until we can win in Vermont and hopefully show other states," Haslam said in a recent interview. "But it's going to have to come from people organizing in their communities and in their neighborhoods, it's definitely not going to come from any charismatic politician that just gets our votes and is going to try and work magic with these millionaire health care lobbyists." The Vermont Worker's Center strategy includes "holding public accountability forums with legislators in every place we can," and gathering thousands of constituent postcards to deliver on the first day of the legislative session. Haslam says the campaign seeks to demonstrate "that there's more people out there that believe in fundamental change than there are that believe in continuing with the status quo or tinkering with a broken system."

Vermont's wild-haired junior Senator Bernie Sanders has never been one for tinkering with the status quo. Recently Sanders authored the "States Right to Innovate in Health Care Act," a bill in the Senate which would allow five states to administer a single payer system (See the full text of the bill here). He has been one of the leading voices pushing against the powerful health care lobbyists, and advocating for single payer in the Senate. In regards to the severity of the health care crisis, Sanders had the following to say in a recent editorial, "Let's be clear. Our health care system is disintegrating. Today, 46 million people have no health insurance and even more are under-insured with high deductibles and co-payments. At a time when 60 million people, including many with insurance, do not have access to a medical home, more than 18,000 Americans die every year from preventable illnesses because they do not get to the doctor when they should. This is six times the number who died at the tragedy of 9/11 - but this occurs every year."(7)

Profits at Any Cost

While the Max Baucus' of the world debate in gilded marble halls with lobbyists and CEOs, the direness of the American health care crisis worsens unabated. According to the L.A. Times, a Los Angeles hospital settled out of court for dumping more than 150 mentally ill patients from their hospital beds onto the steps of Skid Row homeless shelters in 2007 and 2008.(8) In order to maximize their profits, hospitals have created a globalized world version of patient dumping. According to the NY Times "Many American hospitals are taking it upon themselves to repatriate [deport] seriously injured or ill immigrants because they cannot find nursing homes willing to accept them without insurance…The hospitals are operating in a void, without governmental assistance or oversight, leaving ample room for legal and ethical transgressions on both sides of the border."(9)

Senator Sanders writes that the prognosis hasn't been dire for everyone. "From 2003 to 2007, the combined profits of the nation's major health insurance companies increased by 170 percent. And, while more and more Americans are losing their jobs and health insurance, the top executives in the industry are receiving lavish compensation packages. It's not just William McGuire, the former head of United Health, who several years ago accumulated stock options worth an estimated $1.6 billion or Cigna CEO Edward Hanway who made more than $120 million in the last five years. The reality is that CEO compensation for the top seven health insurance companies now averages $14.2 million."

Even the very media, who are suppossed to be reporting critically on the legislative process surrounding health care reform, has tried to rake in the massive profits by selling access to the right influential politicans. The Washington Post was scheduled to host $25,000 a person "salon" to bring together lobbyists and health care CEO's with the very policy makers drafting the health care bill.(10)

Besides Baucus, other high profile Democrats have also lent their names to the cause of maximizing Big Pharmaceutical, Insurance, and HMO's profits at the expense of real reform. "It's kind of a give-and-take, quid pro quo kind of environment," said Tom Daschle, President Obama's intial choice for health secretary, who still serves as an advisor to the Obama administration on health care policy. "I think that the stakeholders [the Health Care Industry] wouldn't do this if they didn't think there was something in it for them."(11) One of Obama's closest advisers, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, in a Wall Street Journal interview, stated, "It is more important that health-care legislation inject stiff competition among insurance plans than it is for Congress to create a pure government-run option."(12)

The Road Forward

When asked about the trajectory for health care reform in Vermont, Haslam of the Workers' Center responds with cautious optimism, "We still have our work cut out for us. Democrats who have been in power of the legislature have had excuses for not taking action and going the direction we need to go. Before it was 'Governor Douglas could veto it', which is true, but now they have overridden two vetoes. Now it's 'we need these waivers.' So we're not going to let them have excuses. We're going to get so many people involved to make it politically possible. In the end if we do a good job there will be somebody, some ambitious politician who will see the writing on the wall, who will see the winds are changing and that people are ready for this, people are demanding it. People will take to the streets and do whatever we have to do to get [the politicians] to do what people have wanted for a long time."

As for Max Baucus, Obama, and the fight for meaningful health care reform on the national level, a much anticipated piece of the bill from Baucus' Finance Committee is expected this week.

Meanwhile, nine more health care activists, including doctors and an 11-year-old girl, and were arrested Monday, in a Des Moines, Iowa Blue Cross Blue Shield. According to the Des Moines Register, "The protesters, who were supporting creation of a single-payer health care system, denounced private insurance companies as 'bloodsuckers' and carried a sign decorated with pictures of tombstones and a declaration that 'Insurance Profits Make Us Sick.'"(13)

Whether or not the powerful Max Baucus will listen remains to be seen.

Notes:

1. Center for Responsive Politics - Top 20 Industries contributing to Campaign Committe and Leadership PAC

http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/industries.php?type=C&cid=N00004643&newMem=N&recs=20&cycle=2008

2. Industry Cash Flowed To Drafters of Reform

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/20/AR2009072003363.html?hpid=topnews

3. Baucus Healthcare Plan: Arrest Doctors, Nurses

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/thebeat/435159

4. Top House Democrats struggling on health care bill

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_HEALTH_CARE_OVERHAUL?SITE=MAHYC&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

5. In Poll, Wide Support for Government-Run Health

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/21/health/policy/21poll.html

6. Insured, but Bankrupted by Health Crises

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/01/business/01meddebt.html

7. Health Care is a Right, Not a Privilege

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rep-bernie-sanders/health-care-is-a-right-no_b_212770.html

8. College Hospital to pay $1.6 million in homeless dumping settlement

http://articles.latimes.com/2009/apr/09/local/me-homeless-dumping9

9. Immigrants Facing Deportation by U.S. Hospitals

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/us/03deport.html?_r=1&pagewanted=1&bl

10. Washington Post cancels $25,000 "salon" with lobbyists

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/entertainment/2009411897_apuspostconferences.html

11. Health Deals Could Harbor Hidden Costs

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/08/health/policy/08health.html?hp

12. White House Open to Deal on Public Health Plan

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124692407982802911.html

13. Nine arrested in demonstration at Wellmark

http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20090728/NEWS/90727067/1001/

Photo from Flickr by NESRI

Vermonters Stand Up to War Profiteer General Dynamics

Originally published on Toward Freedom

Re-published on Common Dreams, Z Net, After Downing Street

Wednesday, 29 October 2008 22:56 Jonathan Leavitt

Since the early 1980s, Vermont activists such as Robin Lloyd, Joseph Gainza, Brian Tokar and Jolen Mulvaney have been committing acts of civil disobedience at General Dynamics Burlington design facility and firing range. They climbed fences in order to pour red paint on GD weapons and placed flowers in the barrels of GD cannons. Along with 200 others, they occupied the GD firing range, lying down in front of GD trucks with Gatling guns destined for Ronald Reagan's dirty wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador. "The civil disobedience doesn't stop when you're in the courtroom. Every word of becomes part of the public record and is written down beautifully," Mulvaney said, her Vermont gubernatorial candidate Anthony Pollina earrings flashing.

A lot of knowledge and stories were shared across generations at this activist discussion in Montpelier. Yet no one needed to explain the particulars of courtroom civil disobedience to the youngest member of the panel, 19 year old Rachel Ruggles.

On May 1st of this year, as Ruggles and Kylie Vanerstrom were finishing their freshmen year at the University of Vermont, they walked into the lobby of GD armaments and technical division in Burlington, locked themselves together with eight others, and refused to leave until the company pledged to give back $3.6 million in Vermont tax breaks and convert the 500 local employees to peacetime, "green collar" jobs. Being ignored by GD higher-ups, dragged out of the armament facility by Burlington police, and roundly criticized in the local media for their civil disobedience, was only the beginning. What unfolded afterward was an inspiring display of righteous indignation, and legal maneuvering by women barely old enough to remember a time when this country wasn't at war.

The ensuing trial shared similarities with the famed Winooski 44 civil disobedience, which saw the 1984 occupation of state Senator Robert Stafford's office on the eve of a decisive vote which would allow weapons to be sent to death squads in Central America. Howard Zinn and Ramsey Clark took the stand as expert witnesses as the largest civil disobedience trial in the state's history found the defendants not guilty by reason of necessity. In plainsong this means the Winooski 44's "crime" was pardoned as they were attempting to prevent the larger crime of massive civilian deaths in Reagan's dirty wars. The war profiteer locally testing, assembling and shipping some of the guns to kill peasants in Central America fourteen years ago was General Dynamics.

Rachel and Kylie had no Howard Zinn expert testimony; they represented themselves with legal advice from Sandy Baird, one of the lawyers who successfully defended the Winooski 44. When Vermonters think pitched legal battles played out inside Burlington's Edward J. Costello Courthouse, they usually don't think of 19 year old women taking on the state of Vermont and the world's sixth largest arms maker and winning… well, sort of. This is where it gets complicated.

No one is confusing GD with a paper tiger, or a company with clean bookkeeping. According to a 2006 Washington Post article, "Of the large defense contractors, General Dynamics' concentration in Army programs has given it the most direct benefit from the Iraq war… Since just before the 2001 terrorist attacks," GD's combat systems unit's "revenue and profit have tripled." Just after the May 1st civil disobedience, Burlington journalist Benjamin Dangl, writing about Kylie, Rachel, and the rest of the self described "GD 10," stated that GD had, "$7.8 billion, with $382 million in profits [...] 94% of its contracts come from the US government."

To its critics, GD seems to be the embodiment of everything Dwight Eisenhower cautioned of in his farewell address of the revolving door of money, people, and power between the military, corporations like GD, and the government charged with regulating it all. Eisenhower, ironically a hawkish Republican, called this the "military industrial complex," and said it would pose an ever increasing threat to our democracy.

However, a couple of powerful Vermonters, who regulate war profiteers on a regular basis, tend to disagree. VT Congressman Peter Welch, elected on an anti-war mandate and who, in April 2008, described himself in a VT-based Seven Days article as a "cop on the beat" in regards to Blackwater and KBR's defrauding of taxpayers, has a soft spot for GD as a local employer. Though Kylie was quick to point out "elected officials like Peter Welch claim to be against the war when they're trying to win people's votes, but Welch takes campaign contributions [$3,500] from General Dynamics." Even Senator Patrick Leahy, author of the "War Profiteering Prevention Act of 2007," touts the GD contracts he's helped bring home to the Green Mountain arm of the company all over his website: $900 million, $129 million, $57 million, to name but a few. Many contracts are Hydra-70 missiles headed for Iraq and Afghanistan. His Vermont Chief of Staff Chuck Ross says the Senator believes GD provides, "Good Vermont jobs" and "ensures that our country has the defense it needs."

When pressed about this, Rachel fired back at Vermont's anti-war Congressional delegation, "Jobs and security for who and at what cost? Is that really the first encounter we want people around the world to have with Vermont, a smoking village and all around pieces of rockets that say made in Vermont?" In a 2,300 word Time Magazine expose on General Dynamics in 1985, journalists explained that "Fleets of investigators and critics are challenging General Dynamics' integrity and its fitness to be a pillar of the nation's defense...The Securities and Exchange Commission is studying whether the company may have manipulated its stock price, and the Defense Department is looking into possible national security violations."

In Rachel and Kylie's eyes, GD, like a Dick Cheney crony, has been steadily overcharging taxpayers ever since. According to a 2005 Time Magazine article, GD's CEO has been regularly hauled in front of Congressional investigations recently to find out "why General Dynamics charged the Government for such 'overhead' costs as a $14,975 party at a suburban Washington country club and the babysitting expenses of one of its officials." The same article states, "the Internal Revenue Service is reportedly examining whether General Dynamics has been cheating on taxes," and that the weapons-maker has a history of malfeasance that includes everything from charges of "improperly billing taxpayers $158 million for overhead costs ranging from billing taxpayers for the kenneling of an executive's dog, to the purchase of a company director's kingsize bed." ($158 million can buy a lot of pooch pampering and so the canine in question even comes with an appropriately regal, old world name: Fursten.) Even in the age of Halliburton's fraudulent contracting and overcharging taxpayers, the wet dog stink coming off GD's practices caused the Navy to recently suspend contracts for a time.

At the GD 10 trial's outset, Vermont's State's Attorney TJ Donovan said the activists should sign a plea bargain: agree to pay $77 a piece for restitution, perform 50 hours of community service, and in exchange, receive no criminal record. Other members of the GD 10 claim Donovan was pursing increasing penalties for two protesters who'd previously had their charges dropped in similar plea agreements. One of them, Jen Berger, claims Donovan, "vowed to do away with civil disobedience." Donovan counters he "never said" such a thing, though two other protesters, Rachel and Will Bennington corroborated Berger's claims.

Though in State Attorney Donovan's eyes, "Free speech is not an absolute right. It can be regulated in time, place and manner." Donovan also suggested legal protests like the 5pm peace vigil in front of Burlington's Unitarian Church are "more effective" than the civil disobedience at GD. Bennington agrees that, "it's great that there's a vigil," he but doesn't, "see how having a vigil outside of a church is more effective than going into the belly of the beast and saying that we don't want you here. Segregation wasn't ended by people standing outside of churches and having vigils." At the end of the day all ten of the protesters accepted Donovan's plea deal.

Ruggles claims, "We never planned to pay restitution. We didn't understand what we were signing." So when the other eight members of the GD 10, who'd been locked together in the weapons facility, anted up the money and agreed to perform their community service, it made what came next surprising. The presiding judge asked at their next scheduled appearance how were they going to pay restitution. Kylie and Rachel looked up at the judge, in her bone white collar and mate finish ebony robes, behind her staid bench at the courthouse, and said that they "couldn't pay on moral grounds" restitution to a company that makes manufactures 14,000-pound guns which fire up to 4,200 shots per minute and Hydra 70 rockets in the People's Republic of Burlington.

The response was swift and decisive, Rachel recounted, with the slow intonation of someone still in disbelief: "The judge said morals need to be put aside. She threw the real issue out the window" and held the two "in criminal contempt of court." Kylie said despite the twosome's relative legal naiveté, "We researched restitution laws. The aim of restitution is to ease the burden of a victim. Restitution is for a mom's car that's smashed, or a small business. It was a total misuse of the law. It [restitution] isn't supposed to be punitive." According to Rachel, "She [the Judge] wanted us to pay restitution or go to jail. The judge threatened us with being put in prison indefinitely and being charged daily. We didn't think the judge was bluffing. We went to court fully prepared to go to jail." But in Rachel's words the judge was using the legal system, "like a debtor's prison for a war profiteer."

Cue overwhelming odds and ominous clouds. When asked if they ever doubted themselves, before the final sentencing, Vanerstrom pauses for a moment. "Even some of our friends told us we were being silly," she said. "But even if it were one dollar, we were not going to pay. I never doubted that what we were doing was the right thing and the right cause. When we were ordered to pay restitution and refused to do so it made me more sure." They laundered their "one nice outfit" a piece, and, with lumps in their throats, walked up the steps and through the courthouses' metal detector one final time, prepared to do the perp walk out the back door in handcuffs and orange jumpsuits.

At the sentencing, Donovan pulled out the sort of courtroom pyrotechnics that are usually more the providence of Matlock or John Grisham novels than Patriot Act America circa 2008. He said, "My position was although I didn't agree or condone what they were doing, we reached a fair compromise where they could keep their deferred sentences and pay twice the original amount to a charitable fund for injured soldiers [instead of General Dynamics]." Kylie says, "I feel grateful, TJ could have stood aside and been silent. I think we had a strange miscommunication. He kind of came through for us." Though, she adds, Donovan lectured the two of them, saying "having a criminal record isn't a badge of honor." After reassuring the Judge multiple times that they would pay, an exhausted Rachel and Kylie emerged "victorious" in their words, in principal, if not on paper. "I think Kylie and I were probably the happiest people who have ever left that court room."

As for the future, I asked each if they would disappear into a quiet life, now that their trial is finally behind them. Rachel smiled and said, "I'm relieved the court case is over and feel ready to do something bigger. We fought our battle. TJ and other attorneys would have it that civil disobedience didn't happen. The change we're talking about is huge, it's an economic conversion. I don't know how we could do it if we weren't civilly disobedient at times. More large scale civil disobedience is necessary and I'll be happy to participate in that because of what we're up against." Almost finishing her sentence Kylie chimes in, "we've been involved with a new group concerned with Vermont's transitioning economy into a peace economy. And we have big plans for the future. We want Vermont's major export not to be weapons of mass destruction."

Kylie, Rachel and the rest of the GD 10 have their work cut out for them as the torrent of money continues to pour into GD: a new $51 million dollar contract was signed the day after their arrest. So far in October, GD has signed $704 million in new contracts. Not to be outdone, the activists have called a rally against GD at Vermont's Statehouse on Saturday November 1 at 1:30 pm. According to Joelen Mulvaney, suddenly now it's this new generation's civil disobedience "inspiring" the older activists.

More information on Rachel, Kylie and the Vermont movement against General Dynamics can be found here: http://stopgeneraldynamics.blogspot.com/

***

See this video of the May 1st action at General Dynamics in Burlington, VT. Filmed and edited by Sam Mayfield: