As Hurricane Sandy pushes further inland to devastate Appalachia and Canada, three women from New England, including Green Party Presidential Candidate Dr. Jill Stein, are risking arrest to highlight the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline’s connection to extreme weather events and climate change. Dr. Stein, a Massachusetts resident, is resupplying tree sitters in Winnsboro, Texas as two women from New England launch a new tree blockade a few hours to the south near Sacul, Texas. The Winnsboro tree blockade has sustained resistance to the Keystone XL pipeline for 38 days.

“The climate is taking this election by storm, breaking the silence of the Obama and Romney campaigns that have been bought and paid for by the oil, coal and gas companies,” said Dr. Stein. “Hurricane Sandy is just a taste of what’s to come under the climate destroying policies of Romney and Obama. We must stand up now and call for climate solutions and green prosperity. The blockaders are heroes. They are on the front line of stopping even worse climate storms in the future.”

Now blocking the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline from two new tree platforms in Sacul, Texas to the northwest of Nacogdoches are a 24-year-old duo of lifelong New England residents, Pika from Vermont and Lauren from New Hampshire. Their platforms are suspended in trees on either side of a Keystone XL highway crossing and are tied to heavy equipment, effectively immobilizing the equipment to the north and south of the crossing. Both were driven to ...

The state of Vermont— Mecca of hemp-wearing, Subaru-driving, Co-op-loving, Frisbee revolutionaries—is paradoxically gaining attention for its leading role in supporting the private, for-profit corrections industry.  

WWBJD? (What would Ben & Jerry do?)

Behind only New Mexico, Hawaii, and Montana, the state of Vermont now houses the largest proportion of its inmates—28 percent—in prisons owned and operated by for-profit corrections firms. Vermont, in fact, recently renewed its two-year, $24.9 million contract with Nashville-based Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the nation’s largest private prison owner and operator. According to the terms of the agreement, CCA will house nearly 600 of Vermont’s youngest and healthiest inmates in Kentucky and Arizona-based facilities from July 2011 to July 2013. 

Since 1998, Vermont’s Department of Corrections (DOC) has justified its partnership with CCA by appeals to efficiency. But are CCA-operated facilities really more cost-effective than state-run prisons?

The answer may surprise you.

Despite Vermont’s steady-to-declining crime-rate, incarceration in the Green Mountain state has increased by 270 percent since 1990. And the state’s DOC budget has grown by almost 400 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars over the same period.  Burgeoning expenditures and inmate populations alike are attributable to changes in state and federal sentencing guidelines. According to the Vermont DOC, “both the length of sentence and the number of persons sentenced have increased” since the early 1990s by virtue of the expansion of state DWI laws (1991), ...

As the 2012 Farm Bill continues to take shape in the halls of the United States Congress, the immense influence of corporate interests is on display.

On Jun. 21 the United States’ Senate voted overwhelmingly against the Sanders Amendment that would have allowed states to pass legislation that required food and beverage products to label whether or not they contain genetically engineered ingredients.

The amendment, proposed by Independent Senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders, is particularly relevant as many states prepare to vote on a ballot initiatives that would require such labelling of genetically modified (GM) foods.

Lobbyists from the biotech industry have ardently opposed GMO labelling. These opponents argue that because food labelling has historically been handled by the Food and Drug Association (FDA), it is a federal issue and, therefore, individual states do not have the right to implement such legislation. Indeed, in the case of Vermont, Sander’s home state, ...

Senator Bernie Sanders is urging his colleagues to allow individual states to require the labeling of all genetically engineered foods. Sanders' proposal is one of more than 80 amendments to the new Farm Bill.

The Vermont Legislature considered a labeling bill this past session but Democratic leaders decided not to bring it up because of concerns that the major chemical companies would sue the state.

Speaking on the Senate floor, Sanders said his amendment makes it clear that states do have the authority to address this issue if they choose to:

"Amendment number 2310 is about allowing states to honor the wishes of their residents and allowing consumers to know what they are eating," said Sanders. "If this is not a conservative amendment I don't know what is. Americans deserve the right to know what they and their children are eating and that is what this amendment is all about."

And Sanders notes that dozens of ...

I think gay marriage is an incredibly boring subject; though, I do like to hear right-wingers say that it will bring the whole edifice of Western civilization crashing down. It's hard, these days, to find such messages of good cheer. I don't yearn for such a union, so I have no personal stake in the issue. Occasionally, my gay friends tell me they've got married. They never seem especially exuberant.

So the liberal progressives glory in Obama's "courage" and many a doubting heart is lighter and more forgiving about the president's betrayals. Trashing the Constitution, green lighting torture, and claiming the unilateral right to order the execution of anyone, anywhere on the planet ... wiped clean off the windscreen.

It started with lesbian couples in Vermont in the mid-1990s, freaked out they'd lose their babies. Vermont Freedom to Marry was born, and it is now the most powerful democratic organization in the state. It is most certainly responsible for the victory of Gov. Peter Shumlin, who was elected in Nov. 2010 and who, nine months later, was the first sitting governor in the United States to preside over a same-sex wedding ceremony.

Fairly early on, gay-marriage lobbying groups realized that whatever else, they had a gigantic money-raising machine on their hands. Not long thereafter, the right wing realized the same thing. John Scagliotti, maker of "Before Stonewall," a famous movie about the birth of the gay movement, says he reckons gay marriage is so potent a fundraising tool because whereas it's hard to visualize anti-discrimination, it's not at all hard to visualize two men or two women saying, "We do."

So Obama didn't really have too much of a choice. Though, it wasn't risk free, since there are a lot of straight voters out there, as in the state of North Carolina, which recently voted overwhelmingly against gay marriage. North Carolina voters ...

The Senate today voted 62-37 for a bill that Sen. Bernie Sanders helped craft to modernize the U.S. Postal Service, save tens of thousands of jobs and spare rural post offices and scores of mail sorting plants threatened with closure.

Sanders (I-Vt.) said a processing center at White River Junction, Vt., would remain open and 15 rural Vermont post offices are likely to win reprieves under the Senate-passed measure that now goes to the House.

"This comprehensive postal reform legislation will preserve vitally important rural post offices and mail processing plants," Sanders said. "It also would give the Postal Service the flexibility that it needs to raise additional revenue in the years to come by offering innovative new products and services in the digital age.

"There is no question that the Postal Service needs to become more entrepreneurial to meet the changing needs of the digital revolution, but the answer is not to make mail delivery slower. The answer is not to radically downsize the Postal Service. The answer is not to eliminate over 200,000 jobs in the midst of a terrible recession. The answer is not to devastate rural communities by closing their post offices,' Sanders added.

The bill includes provisions to keep overnight delivery standards for regional areas for at least three years. It would also prevent the Postal Service from eliminating Saturday mail delivery for two years and make it much more difficult for Saturday mail delivery to end after the two-year ban. It creates a commission Sanders suggested to come up with ways for the Postal Service to become more entrepreneurial as it adjusts to mail volume changes caused by e-mail and the Internet. Financial pressure on the Postal Service would be relieved by reducing obligations to pay for future and current retiree health benefits by some $5.5 billion a year.

The bill also includes a Sanders-backed provision that would prevent rural post ...

On Wednesday, a group of members of Congress, local and state lawmakers, and activist groups met in a Capitol Visitor Center hearing room to do something unusual for its loftiness: they announced and signed a “declaration for democracy,” pledging their support to an amendment to the U.S. Constitution to overturn the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, which allowed unlimited spending by corporations and unions on elections.

Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), himself the author of such an amendment, was one of the first lawmakers to speak:

The U.S. Constitution has served us very well, but when the Supreme Court says, for purposes of the First Amendment, that corporations are people, that writing checks from the company’s bank account is constitutionally-protected speech and that attempts by the federal government and states to impose reasonable restrictions on campaign ads are unconstitutional, our democracy is in grave danger. There comes a time when an issue is so important that the only way to address it is by constitutional amendment.

Sanders was joined by Sens. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Tom Udall (D-NM), as well as Democratic Reps. John Conyers (Mich.), Donna Edwards (Md.), Keith Ellison (Minn.), Rush Holt (N.J.), John Sarbanes (Md.), Betty Sutton (Ohio), Sheila Jackson Lee (Texas), Ted Deutch (Fla.), Hank Johnson (Ga.), Peter Welch (Vt.), and David Cicilline (R.I.). Many have introduced constitutional amendments of their own; all signed on to the declaration and expressed their support for the movement.

Each member echoed Sanders, especially focusing on the momentum building across the country for such an amendment. Hawaii, New Mexico, and this week, Vermont, have all passed resolutions in their state ...

Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin has less than two weeks to either stand with the 90 percent of his constituents who support a mandatory labeling bill for genetically engineered foods -- or cave in to Monsanto's threat to sue the state if legislators pass H.722.

If the Governor's words this past week are any indication, he's already surrendered to Monsanto. But Vermonters, not known for backing down from a fight, are challenging legislators to take on the biotech industry. They're even offering to raise money for the state's defense.

Last week thousands of Vermonters flooded the Governor's office with petitions, phone calls and emails, to make the case for GMO labeling of all food sold in Vermont and to demand a vote on the bill. Under Vermont's constitution, the Governor can extend the state's legislative session indefinitely, ultimately forcing a vote on the bill. If he doesn't extend the session, or urge legislators to vote on the bill, it will die in committee.

But while supporters were emailing and phoning and signing, Governor Shumlin was sending out a canned response to the thousands of supporters who emailed his office. In the Governor's own words:

Dear Friend,

Thank you for contacting me about labeling genetically modified foods. I agree with those who advocate for clear labeling of genetically modified foods. GMO labeling makes sense and would give Vermonters key information about their food choices. However, we know from attempts to pass similar legislation in the past that such a requirement would not stand up to federal legal scrutiny. I don't think it is fair to ask Vermonters to bear the burden of the cost of those legal challenges...

On April 12, in the hope once again of forcing a vote, more than 300 people packed the Vermont statehouse for public testimony on H.722, with more than one hundred of them testifying -- every single one in favor -- of passing the bill. ...

Good news from our friends in the north: the Vermont Senate has approved a resolution which would amend the U.S. Constitution and reverse the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision. That decision helped pave the way for Big Money to have an even larger impact on U.S. elections, essentially by ruling that corporations have a constitutional right to free speech in spending unlimited amounts on campaigns.

Vermont joins cities and states across the country in passing the resolution. Earlier this year, in fact, 64 Vermont towns passed similar declarations in town halls calling on Congress to pass the constitutional amendment.

According to the Burlington Free Press, the resolution passed by the Senate (which heads next to the state House) asks Congress to consider an amendment “that provides that money is not speech and corporations are not persons under the U.S. Constitution and that also affirms the constitutional rights of natural persons.”

The resolution is a result of the hard work of good government groups including Public Citizen, Move to Amend, and local organizations. Public Citizen, in a press release last week, hailed the efforts of legislators including state Sen. Ginny Lyons (D-Williston) who shepherded the resolution to the Senate.

Public Citizen:

“The passage of the resolution is just one step toward a U.S. constitutional amendment declaring that the rights of natural persons ...

READ FULL POST

16 COMMENTS