Monthly Archives: April 2021

Another BLM Brouhaha, This Time in Essex

Hey, remember when a couple of QAnon-ish Trumpers ran for Barre City Council because they were upset over the flying of the “Black Lives Matter” flag? Well, we got us another BLM hater.

Meet Liz Cady, candidate for Essex Westford School Board (election 4/13). Her brand of fringe politics is more subtle than the Barre Boys, but it’s pretty out there. Since the Essex Reporter’s bland ‘n boring candidate profile didn’t dig into her anti-BLM advocacy, it falls to this here blog to fill the gap.

Cady is running against two-term incumbent Liz Subin. And if you carefully read the above campaign mailer, you’ll see quite a few plausibly deniable conservative dog whistles. But let’s get to a couple of telling details first.

Cady doesn’t say so on the flyer, but both of her children are in private school. She tries to elide this inconvenient fact on the flip side of her mailer, which starts “Like all parents, I want my two school-age children to receive the best education possible.”

She’s a district resident and (presumably) a taxpayer, so there’s nothing wrong with her running for school board. But if I were a district voter, I’d think twice about electing someone who has pulled her kids out of the schools.

But the bigger deal is her antipathy toward Black Lives Matter. Last year, after more than 100 students signed a petition to fly the BLM flag, the school board voted to do so. Last September, Cady spoke to the school board during public comment time and unleashed an often ungrammatical screed that, I am not kidding, called BLM a carbon copy of the Nazi movement. (Meeting is archived online; her comments start at about the 18:50 mark.)

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Why the Sudden Reticence, Madame Treasurer?

This kinda got lost in the wake of Speaker Jill Krowinski’s retreat on pension reform, but Treasurer Beth Pearce has taken a curious stand on fund management. She seems dead set against a legislative review of the pension funds’ track record.

Normally she’s a fiscal bloodhound, whenever shy about exploring any and all financial issues to the last decimal point and sounding the alarm when she sees fit. But not this one time.

As a reminder, the state treasurer occupies one of seven seats on the Vermont Pension Investment Committee, which makes the investment decisions.

I’d been wondering how the pensions underperformed badly during a historically long bull market. I mean, couldn’t a roomful of monkeys with Bloomberg terminals make money on Wall Street these days? Now, Seven Days’ Kevin McCallum has put numbers to my feeling.

Over the last decade, the S&P 500, a benchmark for the U.S. stock market, enjoyed an average annual return of 13.6 percent. Over that same period, Vermont’s public pension funds earned an average of just 7.2 percent a year from its investments.

That’s not an entirely fair comparison, as McCallum pointed out, since pension funds can’t take chances with their investments. But then he compared Vermont’s funds to other similarly sized public pension funds, and found that Vermont ranked 69th out of 100. Not exactly sterling.

Members of the House Government Operations Committee, who risked political suicide by exploring Krowinski’s reform plan, aren’t happy with the funds’ performance. Committee vice chair John Gannon, who has financial credentials to rival Pearce’s*, called the funds’ performance “horrendous.” Yikes.

*Eleven years at the Securities and Exchange Commission and several at the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority.

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The Speaker Runs for Cover

Well, that didn’t take long.

After steadfastly insisting that Vermont’s public sector pension plans urgently needed an immediate overhaul, House Speaker Jill Krowinski sounded the retreat Friday morning.

It stands to reason, considering the intense backlash her plan received since it was kinda-sorta unveiled on March 24. (Only nine days ago!) Krowinski has now fallen back on the lawmaker’s favorite way to defer tough decisions: a task force.

I guess the situation somehow got a lot less critical.

She deserves credit for gracefully abandoning an unsustainable position. But how did she not see this coming?

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Some Tortured Logic from the Attorney General’s Office

In the news today, the state of Vermont settled a discrimination lawsuit brought by a former clerk at the Washington County Courthouse in Barre. Shanda WIlliams was fired in 2018, and filed suit the following year alleging racial discrimination by her supervisor, Tammy Tyda. The state will pay her $60,000 to settle the case.

Fair enough. Sounds like the state got off lightly, given Seven Days’ account of her work experience. But there was a passage in the article that really bugs me. I think you can figure it out.

Last May, the Vermont Attorney General’s Office asked a federal judge to dismiss the case on the grounds that Williams’ initial filing was scant on evidence of discrimination. Williams had noted that she was the only Black worker in the Barre office. But the state argued that, because only 1.4 percent of Vermont’s population is Black, Williams’ “office was more diverse than Vermont generally.”

That’s some Kafkaesque reasoning right there. The only Black person in a workplace can’t possibly have suffered discrimination because… Vermont is an overwhelmingly white state?

Sheesh.

There’s so much wrong here.

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