Today I signed up to attend the Thursday 50501 rally at the Statehouse in Montpelier. Will probably bring along my mediocre “No-ligarchs” sign.
Doing Something.
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VSEA Alleges “Authoritarian Environment” in the Economic Services Division
The Vermont State Employees Association isn’t exactly the International Workers of the World. It generally tries to avoid rocking the boat, and comes in for a fair bit of criticism from more progressive elements of the labor movement in Vermont.
Which made it all the more remarkable when two top VSEA officials went before the House Human Services Committee last Thursday to deliver harsh accusations against the Department of Children and Families’ Economic Services Division in general and its top official, Deputy Commissioner Miranda Gray, in particular. Gray, they said, has created “an authoritarian, top-down environment in which fear is used as a weapon,” leaving employees “demoralized and fearful.”
VSEA President Aimee Bertrand (pictured above), a longtime ESD employee, told her own tale of harassment, retaliation, and punitive actions that led her and the union to file an unfair labor practice charge with the Vermont Labor Relations Board. That filing, she said, led to further retaliatory actions. All of which would appear to violate terms of the union’s contract and/or state law.
It was a stunning event. I’ve been in and around the Statehouse for over a decade, and rarely have I seen such dramatic testimony. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such serious accusations made by VSEA against a unit of state government.
You may not have noticed any of this, because the media coverage was pitifully inadequate.
Continue readingDoing Something.
Today we sent a donation to PFLAG. As with the Pride Center of Vermont, I’m sure they are far busier than they were before January 20 and are in need of the help. And we have personal connections to the LGBTQ+ community, so these issues are especially important to us.
I’m trying to vary my actions, and not concentrate too much on donations. But sometimes things just line up in certain ways.
News You Should View: Mostly About Trump Again, Sorry
Well, I thought I had a nice varied collection of stories for this week’s Vermont media roundup. But heck, five of the eight nominees have something to do with how the excesses of Donald Trump are reverberating here in our B.L.S.
Apologies, but that’s the world we’re living in and my starship is on the fritz.
A stark warning about Trump from someone who’s been right more than most. Journalist David Goodman hosts “Vermont Conversation,” a blandly-named weekly show on Radio Vermont/WDEV available afterward as a podcast under the auspices of VTDigger. This week’s guest was author and Dartmouth prof Jeff Sharlet, who has spent years chronicling the dark corners of the far right. He has foreseen the persistence of the Trump phenomenon, its return to power, and its authoritarian intent. He told Goodman that he and his colleagues have “all been surprised by the speed with which it’s happening,” and said that the opposition has a lot of work to do.
Sharlet said he’s seen “a lot more people tuning out than in the first Trump administration. And I want to say to people, you don’t have that privilege.”
Echoes of fascism in a small rural library. In the latest installment of her podcast “Rumble Strip,” Erica Heilman takes us to the Haskell Free Library in Derby Line, VT and Stanstead, QC for an audio accounting of authoritarianism’s jackbooted footprint. The feds’ crackdown on the security-imperiling cross-border traffic at the library, announced after a deliberately provocative visit from dog-killer and Trump functionary Kristi Noem has left both communities shaken. For no reason whatsoever except that our federal government feels compelled to act like a bully.
Continue readingDoing Something.
Today I wrote an email to Vermont Attorney General Charity Clark urging her to take all possible steps against illegal detentions by ICE and the Border Patrol. Indivisible Blue State Defiance has set up a simple way to send an email to your attorney general. (It also put me on BSD’s mailing list, I’m sure.) The process begins with a form email, but you can customize it to your liking before it’s sent. I did a pretty thorough rework of the opening paragraph to make it more pertinent to Vermont.
Doing Something.
Had a bit of a busy day and almost let this slip by. But no! Today I made a donation to the Pride Center of Vermont, which I’m sure is busy as all getout what with Shitler’s war on trans folk and all.
Doing Something.
In honor of the fascist overreach hitting close to home, I made a donation to the ACLU of Vermont. They seem to be pretty busy these days.
The Inquisition Impulse Is Alive and Well
An Evangelical Christian journalist named Mike Cosper has just produced “The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea,” a six-part podcast about the Satanic panic that gripped the Evangelical community between 1981 and 1993. I haven’t listened to it yet, but I did hear an interview with Cosper and it feeds into a bunch of stuff that’s been on my mind since Donald Trump took office in January.
(Side note: Cosper previously produced “The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill,” a podcast about an Evangelical megachurch whose pastor, Mark Driscoll, turned out to be a power-hungry sociopath. That podcast is worth a listen, although Cosper didn’t really address the factors innate in Evangelicalism that tend to enable the Driscolls of the world. He kind of treated it as a one-off instead of a sadly familiar story of charismatic religious leaders going off the rails and taking their followers along for the ride. So, grain of salt regarding Cosper’s new podcast.)
For those unfamiliar, many Americans were convinced that there was a widespread, secret, well-connected Satanic movement that was subjecting children to all kinds of unspeakable abuse. Cosper says the FBI received 12,000 complaints and conducted 11,000 investigations — and never found a single actionable case of Satanic activity. But in the process, many a life was ruined by baseless allegations.
When I was about two minutes into the interview, I thought to myself, “Wow, this sounds exactly like QAnon!” Well, QAnon but really the whole range of conservative moral panics fueling Trumpism, including the rage-induced policies targeting LGBTQ+ people. It is exactly the same thing. And the current panic is just as groundless as the Satanic panic of two generations ago.
Continue readingDoing Something.
Another simple one today. I signed up to Third Act’s email list. Third Act — well, literally they call themselves Th!rd Act — is an activist organization centered on climate change for people of a certain age. Given that I crossed the AARP Rubicon about two decades ago, it seems like my people.
I hate to further clutter my inbox, but the anti-Trump “movement” is still pretty dispersed. A whole lot of energy, and scrappy bits of organization trying to channel it effectively. So I’m trying to cast my net a bit wider to stay informed about what’s going on and how I might participate.
Update. I also signed up for Third Act Vermont‘s email list.
Doing Something.
Back to putting one foot forward every day. Today I wrote a note of encouragement to state Sen. Becca White, who accompanied her constituent Mohsen Mahdawi to his “citizenship meeting,” which turned out (as she suspected) to be a trap. She then bore witness to his detention by masked federal agents in unmarked vehicles — nothing suspicious there — and has since been his leading advocate. She deserves credit for stepping into the breach. A lesser politician (*cough*PhilScott*cough*) would have taken a safer course.
It’s important to be in touch with elected officials on critical issues. It’s also important to encourage them when they do the right thing.
The Vermont Political Observer. 