Writing by Jonathan Leavitt

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Bill McKibben on Burlington's Letter on Understanding with Lockheed

by: Jonathan Leavitt

Green Mountain Daily

Sun Mar 06, 2011 at 12:11:07 PM EST

(Jonathan writes, "Using the very real climate crisis as a fig leaf for getting in bed with Lockheed to deal with his leading political liability is beyond the pale." I agree. - promoted by Maggie Gundersen)

Noted environmental author and founder of 350.org Bill McKibben on Burlington's Letter on Understanding with Lockheed:
"As someone who thinks a lot about local economies, one of the things we're really good in Vermont at, better than Lockheed are these kind of solutions. [...] We probably don't have to go to find that outside help. I take seriously the idea that people can change, it's harder to see how corporations as deeply enmeshed in one way of doing business and looking at the world as Lockheed is can change. [...] Some of the stuff Lockheed or anyone else would advise us to do would happen automatically if we did the necessary political work at the national level that we need to do. If Lockheed was willing to pull out of the US Chamber of Commerce and say 'they don't speak for us, we don't like the way they deal with climate energy,' then that strikes me, then I'd be willing to give them a look at what they wanted to do here in Burlington. I don't think that's going to happen and until it does I would be disinclined to get too deeply in bed with them."

Jonathan Leavitt :: Bill McKibben on Burlington's Letter on Understanding with Lockheed

McKibben's 350.org just launched a new campaign 'The US Chamber Doesn't Speak For Me' to "show that when it comes to climate and energy, the US Chamber of Commerce represents the interests of big polluters, not everyday American business." According to a recent New York Times article, ("Justices Offer Receptive Ear to Business Interests" 12/18/10) "[The Chamber of Commerce] board includes executives from some of the nation's biggest companies, including Lockheed Martin." The Chamber of Commerce filed a brief in a Supreme Court Case stating, "a suit by eight states against power companies over carbon dioxide emissions, 'has potentially disastrous implications for the U.S. business community.'"

The New York Times article links to the Supreme Court brief which illuminates the lengths the Chamber of Commerce and its corporate partners including Lockheed will go to, to block carbon reductions:
"The Chamber works to discourage ill-conceived policies and measures which could damage the economic security of the United States and instead encourages long term technological innovation and long term clean technology development. The Chamber believes that nuisance suits such as this one which seeks to impose caps and reductions on carbon dioxide emissions in piecemeal fashion on an arbitrary subset of U.S. industry are an especially ill-conceived and constitutionally illegitimate response."
For Burlington to work with a corporation which According to William Hartung's Prophets of War performs drone bombing in Pakistan, buys scandal plagued companies interrogating prisoners in Abu Ghraib, lobbies against nuclear weapons treaties and performs warrantless wiretapping on Americans is bad enough. Discovering Lockheed via its seat on the Chamber pushes the Supreme Court to not regulate carbon emissions on a state and Federal level begs serious questions about the Kiss administration's commitment to addressing climate change.

In Seven Days recent cover story ("Up In Arms" 2/9/11), Mayor Kiss invokes crisis and urgency saying "There's enough urgency to this issue of climate change that we need to look for all the partners that are out there." So it's deeply disappointing that according to its website Mayor Kiss hasn't convened his Mayoral Task Force on Climate Change (E2C2) full of award winning local climate change talent since November 14, 2007.

Now that City Council has overwhelmingly passed a resolution rebuking the lack of transparency and public comment which Mayor Kiss would attach Burlington's sterling reputation to Lockheed; now that Burlingtonians have spoken out unanimously at City Council in overwhelming number, including green engineers and sustainability leaders; now that UVM Student Government has overwhelmingly passed a similar resolution critiquing this most unlikely of bedfellows; one would hope Mayor Kiss would listen. One would hope Mayor Kiss would do the moral, just and right thing and end this corporate PR job of a deal, quickly re-convene his long dormant Mayoral Task Force on Climate Change, and find more appropriate and just ways to incentivize Burlington's already award-winning responses climate change.

When discussing the Lockheed Letter of Understanding Mayor Kiss mentions potential Burlington Telecom financing from Lockheed. Using the very real climate crisis as a fig leaf for getting in bed with Lockheed to deal with his leading political liability is beyond the pale. When I supported Mayor Kiss on the re-election trail in 2008, he invoked in debates the words of former Burlington Mayor Bernie Sanders': "Burlington is open for business but not for sale." If Burlingtonians keep organizing and speaking out against the Lockheed Letter of Understanding, hopefully we can help Mayor Kiss live up to those words.

Cover Story!

And here's the digital version: http://www.vtcommons.org/journal/2011/02/jonathan-leavitt-burlington-kisses-lockheed-just-say-no-feature

Thursday, December 30, 2010

Greenwashing War: Burlington, Vermont Mayor Signs Deal With Lockheed Martin

Originally published on Toward Freedom

Thursday, 30 December 2010 02:43 Jonathan Leavitt

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Lockheed's Trident Missile

When it leaked in Seven Days, a local alternative weekly, that Mayor Bob Kiss of liberal mecca Burlington, Vermont had inked a deal with the world's largest war profiteer all hell broke loose inside the Burlington left. Charges of "corporate greenwashing" and hypocrisy lit up Facebook pages and coffeeshop conversations. These charges land fresh like the daily newspaper at the doorstep of most mayors of American cities. Mayor Bob Kiss however, is a former conscientious objector, and a member of Vermont's Progressive Party, the most successful third party in the US, which touts a platform totally at odds with war profiteers like Lockheed. It's the party that claims Bernie Sanders, the US' lone socialist senator, recent Filibuster leader and viral web sensation amongst its founders. Mayor Kiss, whose party has for 28 of the last 30 years controlled City Hall, was learning what many social movements that assume governmental control learn: wielding power without alienating the community organizers and social movements that put leaders into office can prove to be quite the difficult equation to balance.

That few details were available when the contractual "letter of intent," adorned with Lockheed Martin's corporate logo, was signed by Mayor Kiss and Lockheed's Senior Vice President certainly didn't assuage the rising indignation of community organizers. Interestingly, it was Mayor Kiss who approached Lockheed about the deal at the inaugural "Carbon War Room," which took place simultaneously with the Vancouver Olympics. The Carbon War Room is a pet project of the 212th richest person in the world, billionaire Sir Richard Branson, CEO of Virgin Group. Branson's record and cola empire also counts amongst its corporate family global warming contributors like Virgin Airlines and the quixotic, carbon emissions nightmare of Virgin Galactic, space tourism for $200,000 a ticket.

Branson's Carbon War Room partners cities with corporations like Lockheed and private financiers to create market based solutions to climate change. The single-sided, single page letter of cooperation details vague projects for Lockheed to partner with Burlington on including "Urban Triage," "Vertical Wind Turbines," "Solar Photovoltaic Systems," "Telemetrics" and "Three dimensional LIDAR City models." Branson's War Room describes itself as a "30-month challenge to help cities around the world use innovative mechanisms to bring capital, energy technologies and jobs to their citizens in a sustainable and wealth creating way."

Wealth creating in this sense means privatizing existing not-for profit climate change fighting measures like the PACE program (PACE lets US home owners bundle home renewable energy financing into their mortgage, spreading out the payments over 25-30 years instead of the usual home improvement loan term of lease of five years). According to the Climate War Room's literature the United States' PACE market, "is valued at $500 billion." This sort of privatization, which spins governmental non-profit programs into new markets, and thereby so much gold for "gold-level" corporate sponsors of the "War Room" like Lockheed, and billionaires like Branson, is but one of the objectionable pieces of the deal to its detractors. Perhaps even more immediate and inflammatory is the planned interaction between Burlington's school children and Lockheed Martin engineers.

"Are We For Bomb Makers?"

One of the controversial aspects of the deal would allow Lockheed engineers to work inside Burlington schools with schoolchildren. In the past five years Burlington parents' and students' outrage boiled over when war profiteer General Dynamics' program of giving away pencils, bookmarks and books stamped with their corporate logo came to light. When a nine year-old student at Burlington's Champlain Elementary was faced with going to an assembly during the school day to listen to General Dynamics employees, her mom Laurie Essig says her daughter Willa asked, "'Are we for bomb-makers? Do we think it's right to kill people? Her basic question was, 'Why are we treating these people like heroes?'" Due to a perception on Willa's teacher's part, that nine year-old Willa might offend the weapons manufacturers’ employees, the teacher, "brought all the other students down to get their free books and left my daughter sitting alone in the classroom." Essig says. Longtime Vermont peace activist, Joseph Gainza said, during an interview, "I would hope that the City of Burlington and the Burlington School District wouldn't let a corporate member of the military industrial complex take credit for solving the climate change problems it helps everyday to perpetuate."

Meg Brooke, Chair of Chittenden County Progressives says of Lockheed's slated involvement with school kids:

I’ve been trained by the National Interreligious Service Board for Conscientious Objectors (NISBCO) and given many hours to council students how to avoid war. I’ve fought to remove military recruiters from our schools. I regularly taught classes in non-violent conflict resolution in Vermont high schools. I am deeply concerned by the way we normalize violence and war and desensitize our young to the horror our military perpetrates, especially on the young, women, and the elderly. Welcoming one of the leaders of this military industrial complex into our schools goes against all I, and many others, believe. I do not want young Vermonters to see the Lockheed logo on TV and have a positive thought about what that business might have done in their school.

Who is Lockheed Martin?

"We Never Forget Who We Work For" is Lockheed Martin's motto. That mindfulness of who they work for takes a different meaning when one considers that 84 percent of Lockheed's revenue comes from the US government, with the majority of that being Pentagon contracts. Lockheed contracted 98 different lobbyists, was mentioned in 142 Congressional bills and spent nearly $10 million in lobbying just in 2010. This is the multi-national war profiteer which to quote Bernie Sanders, "according to the nonpartisan Project on Government Oversight, the three largest government contractors — Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Northrop Grumman — have engaged in 109 combined instances of misconduct just since 1995, and have paid fees and settlements for this misconduct totaling $2.9 billion." Further, something is seriously amiss when George W. Bush's Department of Justice, not exactly known for setting precedents in corporate crime prosecution, files a 2007 fraud lawsuit against a corporation raking in a net $3.033 billion in FY '07 (It's worth noting that 1% of Lockheed Martin's annual profits alone roughly equals the City of Burlington's approximately $30 million budget).

Defense contractors are notorious for their fraudulent overcharging of tax payers for weapons systems that things must have risen to truly historic levels of fraud for Bush's DoJ to take action. Indeed Lockheed is number one in the Federal Contractor Misconduct Database, at 54 instances of contractor misconduct, totaling $577.4 million in settlements, nearly twice as many as the next closest war profiteer.

Lockheed Martin has had separate racial, age and gender discrimination lawsuits filed against it in the past two years alone. Does Mayor Kiss really want Burlington's hard won image attached to the world's largest war profiteer whose supervisors in the last 24 months allowed "deaths threats" and threats to "lynch" an African American employee "to continue unabated – even though the company was aware of the unlawful conduct"? One might think all of the above flies in the face of the subsections of Mayor Kiss' Progressive Party platform which state the Progressive Party will, "Insist Vermont will contract only with responsible employers, including local small businesses and local entrepreneurs, hiring local employees" and "Promote cooperative, worker-owned, and publicly-owned enterprises as democratic alternatives to huge profit-driven multi-national corporations." Indeed, many inside Kiss' Progressive Party have expressed concerns with these provocatively strange bed fellows.

Progressive City Councilor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak who represents Burlington's Ward 3 said in a statement, "When any municipality considers partnering with a corporation there needs to be some sort of conversation around a set of standards and principals that reflect the community. With Burlington those standard would need to include language to reflect issues long enshrined in the fabric of the City's life: human rights issues, equality issues, peace and war issues. Any agreement or discussion needs to be guided by these community standards, be it on a project level or a policy level. Sometimes the money involved in a potential deal or partnership is not enough to compromise these principals. This deal, frankly, considering Lockheed's long track record would violate any reasonable community standards for the City of Burlington."

Lockheed and Grassroots Organizers

What isn't immediately clear is what is left for Lockheed engineers to do around Climate Change in Burlington that isn't currently being done by Burlington’s many NGO's, non-profits and local companies without war profiteer logos on their arms. From award-winning Efficiency Vermont to AgRefresh, from the University of Vermont's Gund Institute to Burlington Walk/Bike Council, from Carshare Vermont to 350.org, from Permaculture Burlington to the Localvore movement, and on and on. Even the City's Department of Public Works is involved, installing rainwater gardens into the very street itself on Decatur St in Burlington's Old North End. There are also local organic farmers playing funk and disco as they make the rounds in their solar powered veggie delivery van. "Corporations like Lockheed Martin are simultaneously funding the denial of global warming and trying to profit from it," says Brian Tokar, Director of Plainfield, Vermont's Institute of Social Ecology and author of the recent book Toward Climate Justice. "It's hard to imagine what they could possibly contribute to Burlington's already leading-edge efforts to become greener and more self-reliant." Progressive Party Chittenden County Chair Meg Brooke states in plainsong, "Lockheed is going to show and take credit for twenty years of grassroots organizers blood and sweat, paid for out of their own pockets."

Then there are the unspoken ironies of Lockheed working on climate change: the US military, with all its Lockheed technologies has a 363,000 barrel per day oil habit, making it the single largest purchaser of oil in the world. If the US military were a country it would be amongst the top 20 countries in annual oil consumption well in front of Australia. Activist Joseph Gainza points to this saying, "Private corporations that helped create climate change are not going to be part of the solution." What's more, as Chittenden County Progressive Chair Meg Brooke said, "The military is the number one enemy of sustainability and Lockheed isn’t going to do much to change that as their money comes from manufacturing machines that are completely unsustainable. Their F35’s, which threaten our environment, use 2,000-4,000 gallons of fuel and hour."

The F-35 is Lockheed's new next generation fighter plane which is controversially slated to be stationed at Burlington Airport. James Leas, one of the main organizers of the Stop the F-35 Coalition in Burlington writes in a widely circulated open letter to Mayor Kiss "Lockheed Martin is one of the world's largest war profiteers. Its products are designed to destroy the environment and living things. Please help me understand how Lockheed Martin, a company that is one of the chief purveyors of death and destruction, is going to be telling Burlington about sustainability?" In 2007, Lockheed sheepishly admitted it had overcharged, and would repay, the Federal government $265 million plus interest for over-billing American taxpayers on the same F-35. Lockheed called the $265 million dollar over-billing “inadvertent.” Author Brian Tokar says, "Lockheed's F35's and other military hardware are among the most petroleum-gorging products in the world. Burlington doesn't need their noisy fighter jets, nor should Vermont tolerate Lockheed's feeble attempts to greenwash their image."

That said, if this pact between Burlington and Lockheed was purely results based, "most sustainability bang for the buck” venture, and not about corporate greenwashing, could Lockheed silently fund the many engineers and community organizers who have been doing climate change and sustainability work inside Burlington for decades, often with little resources? If Lockheed wanted to get the most climate change prevention for their investment, without causing ripples, could they silently dovetail with Burlington's award winning Climate Action Plan and the 200 project ideas it generated? Unlike the Lockheed deal, the Climate Action Plan had many opportunities for public input.

Or perhaps this funding could quietly award under-capitalized companies like Efficiency Vermont, whose low income home weatherization has a two year waiting list. Additionally there is an unfunded Chittenden County Metropolitan Planning Organization study on how physical barriers to separate bike lanes from car traffic would positively or negatively impact downtown business. In many cities where the study has been done, including cities as large as New York City, physical barriers to demarcate bike lanes from car traffic have been shown to create safer, friendlier communities, which increases bike use while simultaneously helping businesses thrive. Absent the capital for the study though, the false "it's bad for business" argument will prevent these bike lane improvements. One climate change consultant estimated the cost of which to be about $10,000 or about the cost of 1/5th of one second in Iraq war spending. But if it were an anonymous benefactor Lockheed couldn't ride Burlington's credibility to the bank, and credibility is the only thing war profiteers like Lockheed Martin can't buy.

The Need For Action in Burlington

In an exclusive meeting with Mayor Kiss he said that the Lockheed/Carbon War Room was not the only way to finance the projects he envisions the City of Burlington taking on, merely the more "serendipitous." I asked Mayor Kiss at the end of the meeting to what degree the outraged grassroots of Burlington can shape the outcome, considering both the media and the community members have discussed possible civil disobedience to stop this contract with the world's largest war profiteer. Mayor Kiss, after demurring several times said, "Well there's nothing date certain in it. This is just a letter of intent, it doesn't have specific benchmarks for specific projects."

What the Mayor is saying is that the community organizers can shape the outcome by calling and emailing him, by organizing your friends and neighbors, and continually raising the stakes to oppose this. Certainly holding a single public hearing where community members could voice concerns would be a natural place for the Mayor to show his responsiveness to the electorate that put him in power. Community organizers and concerned Burlingtonians could ask for City Council resolutions the critiquing the deal using the community standards and principals Councilor Mulvaney-Stanak calls for.

Mayor Kiss and the Burlington City Council have proven themselves responsive policy makers for Burlingtonians when citizens organize and make demands of them in City Council meetings packed with advocates. Indeed that is exactly how in the past year Burlington passed a resolution to boycott the State of Arizona over its controversial immigration law SB 1070, and how legislation pushed by Burlington Police Chief Michael Schirling and downtown business organization The Church Street Marketplace Association to make it a crime to be poor on public sidewalks was stopped cold. If the community continues to organize against Lockheed and if the Mayor is responsive to the grassroots that built his party, then the single page "letter of intent," with no benchmarks, could be slipped deep into the City's archives. That is to say, as usual, everything depends on community organizers building a countervailing pressure to the moneyed interests of corporations and the military which is so strong the elected officials have no choice but to do the moral, just and right thing.

Here are the details for contacting the Mayor's office:

Call: 802-865-7272 (Mayor's Office)

Email: mayor@ci.burlington.vt.us

Jonathan Leavitt is a community organizer and writer based in Burlington, Vermont

Partial List of Environmental Lawsuits and Settlements Against Lockheed Martin

Source: Federal Contractor Misconduct Database

Groundwater Treatment (Burbank, CA)

Groundwater Cleanup Violation (at the Burbank area of the San Fernando Valley Superfund Site)

Wastewater Discharge

Tallevast, Florida Groundwater Toxic Contamination

Pantano Wash Hazardous Waste Disposal Settlement

Emissions Violations at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory

Nuclear Safety Violations (Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory)

Nuclear Safety Violations (Oak Ridge, TN)

Nuclear Waste Storage Violation (Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory)

Radiation Exposure (Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory)

Reactor Safety Violations (Oak Ridge National Laboratory)

Toxic Substances Control Act Violation (PCBs - 2005)

Toxic Substances Control Act Violation (PCBs - 1998)

Violations of Louisiana Environmental Quality Act

Falsification of Testing Records (Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory)

Radioactive Work Control Deficiencies (Sandia National Laboratories)

Radiological Control Deficiencies (Sandia National Laboratories)

Violations of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (Sandia ational Labor

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