Why does Vermont lack the economic opportunity to pull out of poverty? Why do we have a Legislature in Montpelier that protects corporate profits, guaranteeing corporations 17% rate of return, gives our natural resources to corporations for free… but abandons children, vets, the elderly, small business and family farms?
“I forbid, refuse and deny consent of any installation and use of any monitoring, eavesdropping, and surveillance devices on my property… That applies to and includes “Smart Meters”… Any attempt to install any such device… will constitute trespass, stalking, wiretapping and unlawful surveillance and endangerment of health and safety, all prohibited and punishable by law through criminal and civil complaints.”
Your Democrat/Republican/Progressive state legislators support Blood for Oil. Children are the main victims of war. We must stop this. Will you join us?
Government cannot create jobs. What good government can do is get out of the way, respect the rule of law, refrain from acting in the interests of large corporations and special privilege. This restores our economic freedom, and with economic freedom comes jobs.
Here’s a quick education on how the corrupt politicians sitting in the Vermont Legislature are stealing from us. They ignored expert testimony from UVM that they’re taxing us into the ground. $1.2 billion yearly in corporate welfare. The remedy? Vote ‘em all out in 2012.
The Independence Parades in Montpelier and Warren this past weekend saw the unleashing of the Vermont 30: the Independent electoral challenge to retake the Vermont Senate for the people of Vermont in 2012.
This is my personal response to the report of the partisan Blue Ribbon Tax Commission, to the Vermont Legislature. The response of Professor Gary Flomenhoft of the UVM Gund Institute is here and well worth reading, as it illustrates point-by-point that Vermont has far to go in reforming our tax codes. The foremost question is, [...]
Think. Should farmers & consumers in Vermont have as many rights as those in Europe, Australia and New Zealand? The European Union (EU) countries implemented mandatory labeling requirements for genetically engineered soy and corn. By the end of 1998, nearly all the grocery chains and fast food restaurants in the EU had eliminated genetically engineered [...]
A storm is coming. I’m in for 2012, as part of the Vermont Thirty, taking back our Legislature from corporate control.
You may find my positions here, the evolving platform that earned my status as a Liberty Candidate for 2012. The platform may be summed up in the words of Sitting Bull, Chief of the Lakotah Nation: Let us put our minds together, and see what kind of life we can make for our children.
In 2012, I’m going to be a grandpa. Folks, it takes something like this to broaden your perspective… and now it’s personal for me: I am strongly opposed to Vermont taking federal money, because it’s borrowed money that my grandchildren will get stuck paying back. Deprived of the opportunities that I had, simply because of one short-sighted, greedy generation.
I say this now: the job of a State Legislator is to protect the rights and fortunes of the people who sent him to Montpelier. Not; I repeat NOT to give up those rights to gain federal grants for make-work projects in his district.
These federal grants, stimulus and other welfare is DEBT: money borrowed from my grandkids without my consent and spent today. We Vermonters would be better off holding onto our hard-earned cash. It is a traditional Vermont value to do without what we cannot yet afford, to scrimp & save until we can buy something honestly. Handouts simply aren’t the Vermont way.
And that means deep tax reform. No more bogus, partisan, rubber-stamping “blue ribbon commissions”. I’ve been writing about tax reform for a couple years now at ProsperVermont.com, I know what to do.
And I want to hear from you. If the 2012 election taught me anything, it was how to listen. Patiently. And learn.
What’s next?
Public forums & debates: make your voice heard. Ask the hard questions, hold your current representatives accountable. We’ll have a lot more of these this time around, sponsored by communities and independent third parties.
Smart Meters: Learn the truth, and act on it to protect your family from them. Lockheed/Sandia Smart Meters are being pushed as ‘green’, yet they’re anything but. Beware of huge corporations twisting words that are dear to us, words like ‘sustainability’. They do this for their own ends.
Independent ownership & control of Finance, Local Food, Energy, and the Political Will that it takes to get us there. In short, a real future. Doing for ourselves.
The following article was published by fellow blogger Simha Boda of VT4Evolution, a man for whom I’ve got a lot of respect, whether we agree or disagree. Simha makes me think.
Tonight I’m on my way back to Vermont to stay at the Occupation, bringing blankets, toiletries & other essentials that we take for granted. Why does Vermont lack the economic opportunity that results in massive foreclosures? Why have the numbers of homeless people in VT doubled in the last few years? Many of them children?
Why do we have a Legislature in Montpelier that protects corporate profits, guaranteeing corporations 17% rate of return, gives our natural resources to corporations for free… but abandons children, vets, the elderly, small business and family farms?
Why do people so many like me have to work outside of Vermont to pay a Vermont rent mortgage? If I worked for a Vermont business, they couldn’t afford to pay me enough to pay my mortgage. VT taxes business way too much, rents are high and State regulations are too expensive. That’s the wide gap, according to UVM Gund Institute, between median salaries and median house prices.
The middle class can’t afford Vermont any more. Our Legislators, rather than work in our interests, are too busy taking care of the large corporations that own them, to notice. They are too busy to be of any use to VT citizens. The Occupation is among the first attempts to find a remedy.
The occupation of Burlington’s city hall park has entered into a common trend that the nation wide movement of occupations share now, becoming a refuge for the homeless. This issue made it to the attention of Vermont’s mainstream media today Nov. 9th on WCAX after a letter was mailed to Burlington’s Mayor Bob Kiss, stating that the city’s at-capacity Homeless Shelters were referring people to the encampment and the occupiers didn’t have the training nor means to correctly provide assistance to the homeless.
In the WCAX report (VIDEO), The Committee on Temporary Shelter (COTS) is quick to deny the allegations to the mayor after being questioned, but a COTS spokes person goes on to “doubt anyone at COTS would refer someone to the park, but added she’s quite grateful for all the help she has received in camp.”
Did COTS refer homeless to the camp or didn’t they? It isn’t the point, the occupation is fulfilling the humanitarian aid that the State, Federal and private sector should be fulfilling, but isn’t.
Now, COTS isn’t the only institution in Burlington that the homeless turn to for assistance, In this video a homeless Burlington resident reveals that the homeless shelters are overfilled and that an employee of the Howard Center directed him to the Burlington Occupation.
The Howard Center isn’t a shelter to my knowledge, but they are a human services institution and I am sure they know the shelters are full. What other option can they offer?
In Chittenden County, where most of the state’s soup kitchens, food shelves and service agencies are located, the homeless population has more than doubled in two years — from 424 in 2008 to 916 this year. The number of children in those totals jumped from 86 kids two years ago to 256 today…Currently, there’s a two-month wait for beds at the family shelters run by COTS
When I searched the Vermont.gov site for “homeless” I got 13 Million 500 thousand hits! To me this illustrates a crucial point about our society. Human Services are entrapped within the same institutionalization as our politicians, which denies and/or white washes reality with promises and programs that fall way short, when the solution is simple… We are the solution! A society that is sensitive to its own people’s needs is a community, in community there is no bureaucracy because your issues are my issues and by working together the solutions come, sometimes easy, sometimes with a struggle but a community doesn’t turn their back on their own.
The Occupiers are in a fragile situation with the city ordinances namely the curfew, which is illustrated clearly in this recent video of an occupier speaking at a Burlington city council meeting. Having Homeless using the occupation camp as a residence presents a lot of different issues and complexities for the organizers and protesters to deal with. I believe protesters are willing to deal with these complexities because the homeless are one of the resultant casualties of Wall Street’s greed and deception, and because of the precarious situation with the city curfew – illustrated in this video [below] of another occupier speaking at the city council meeting.
Occupy Burlington is not only protesting for a better World they are making it a reality.
The Vermont Legislature’s eliminating the safety net. They cut assistance to Seniors, Vets and even the pensions that Vermont Teachers have earned… bumped the Middle Class up a tax bracket. They’re talking about cutting fuel assistance to Seniors next year.
Austerity has reached Vermont… and it’s being imposed on the least powerful first, then on the Middle Class and small business & family farms.
Forced Austerity breeds civil unrest: people are only allowed to keep a fraction of their hard earned cash… the rest goes to debt service. As the complex web of the economy unwinds, there are no jobs in Vermont. Regardless of ‘job creation’ schemes that cost more money to those who are still working. I’m still working out-of-state every week just to pay the bills, along with many others. Vermonters want to know, where are the opportunities?
This is why the Legislature’s spending like there’s no tomorrow… on police surveillance, tasers, drones, mobile camera vans. And now ‘Smart Meters’… which wiretaps every house that gets one, but it’s GREEN. Actually it’s a scam. Smart Meters violate our rights under the US and Vermont Constitutions. Automation allows the utilities to lay people off!
Hold your State reps & senators accountable. Ask them, what they’re expecting? Civil unrest? Do they even know about this? No? It’s common knowledge… why are they out of touch?
The disappearance of unemployment from elite policy discourse [in Montpelier] and its replacement by deficit panic has been truly remarkable. It’s not a response to public opinion.
In a recent CBS News/New York Times poll, 53 percent of the public named the economy and jobs as the most important problem we face, while only 7 percent named the deficit. -Star Tribune, 7/24/2011
After all, the events of last year didn’t happen:
Foreclosures of Vermont residents did not reach an historic high rate just as the State and some Towns stepped up subsidies to nonresidents. The Vermont State Banking Division didn’t report that “Foreclosures have jumped nearly 30% through August to 1,111 foreclosures compared to 793 for the same period last year.” (Rutland Herald, Sept. 9) And no homeless persons got tasered.
The subsidized media didn’t observe a blackout on 40 Independent candidates running for the Legislature, Attorney General, Treasurer, Lt. Governor & Governor. VPR got no public money for, additionally, promoting smart meters and calling Independents, ‘racist’ on the air.
The Vermont Budget didn’t wind up $400 million short thanks to bloated spending and confiscatory taxation in Montpelier. The Democrats in Washington didn’t write a $400 million check to the State of Vermont to bail out said budget… buying the 2010 election for their fellow Democrats, who would have been otherwise exposed as fiscally incompetent.
The magic money didn’t flow:
Vermont ‘Digger’, a supposedly independent web journal didn’t get a hundred grand for not digging, for observing the media blackout on the 40 Independent candidates, as well as publishing government/military press releases verbatim. ‘Digger’ didn’t become an exclusive mouthpiece for Smart Meters and Smart Grid, censoring any opposing points of view, even using the Hurricane Irene outages as a scare tactic… as if microprocessors and wireless technology can actually stave off the anger of our Grandmother.
Former ‘green’ organizations didn’t get bought: Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund became a money funnel to bribe farmers to plant GMO oilseed instead of food. NOFA-VT didn’t fall in line with the Monsanto agenda, joining Monsanto, Cargill and the rest of Big Ag to back the ‘Food Safety Modernization Act’. NOFA-VT didn’t become worth five million as a reward, in its pursuit of becoming an exclusive marketer of boutique food that middle class Vermonters can’t afford… after all, Monsanto employees know better than to feed their products to their own kids.
Greenwashing consulting firms like ‘Carbon War Room’ didn’t come out of the woodwork. So-called ‘Progressive’ Burlington Mayor Bob Kiss didn’t make deals with Lockheed… Anything and everything can be sugar-coated… and if you’re good at it you can take home a six-figure salary too.
What didn’t happen last year set a stage. Recognize, that words like ‘sustainability’, ‘climate change’, ‘carbon footprint’ are powerful symbols and can be used to manipulate us. Sometimes it’s corporations doing it… sometimes overbearing government, violating your privacy.
The Vermont stage has been set for Smart Meters:
Use the letter below to forbid smart meter installation (or modify the letter to demand the meter be removed).
From:
Energy Customer’s Name
Street Address
Town, VT 00000
To:
Energy Provider
Street Address
City, VT 00000
Date of letter
NOTICE OF NO CONSENT TO TRESPASS AND SURVEILLANCE, NOTICE OF LIABILITY
Dear (Energy Provider) and all agents, officers, employees, contractors and interested parties,
If you intend to install a “Smart Meter” or any activity monitoring device at the above address, you and all other parties are hereby deny consent for installation and use of all such devices on the above property. Installation and use of any activity monitoring device is hereby refused and prohibited. Informed consent is legally required for installation of any surveillance device and any device that will collect and transmit private and personal data to undisclosed and unauthorized parties for undisclosed and unauthorized purposes. Authorization for sharing of personal and private information may only be given by the originator and subject of that information. That authorization is hereby denied and refused with regard to the above property and all its occupants.
“Smart Meters” violate the law and cause endangerment to residents by the following factors:
1. They individually identify electrical devices inside the home and record when they are operated causing invasion of privacy.
2. They monitor household activity and occupancy in violation of rights and domestic security.
3. They transmit wireless signals which may be intercepted by unauthorized and unknown parties. Those signals can be used to monitor behavior and occupancy and they can be used by criminals to aid criminal activity against the occupants.
4. Data about occupant’s daily habits and activities are collected, recorded and stored in permanent databases which are accessed by parties not authorized or invited to know and share that private data by those who’s activities were recorded.
5. Those with access to the smart meter databases can review a permanent history of household activities complete with calendar and time-of-day metrics to gain a highly invasive and detailed view of the lives of the occupants.
6. Those databases may be shared with, or fall into the hands of criminals, blackmailers, corrupt law enforcement, private hackers of wireless transmissions, power company employees, and other unidentified parties who may act against the interests of the occupants under metered surveillance.
7. “Smart Meters” are, by definition, surveillance devices which violate Federal and State wiretapping laws by recording and storing databases of private and personal activities and behaviors without the consent or knowledge of those people who are monitored.
8. It is possible for example, with analysis of certain “Smart Meter” data, for unauthorized and distant parties to determine medical conditions, sexual activities, physical locations of persons within the home, vacancy patterns and personal information and habits of the occupants.
9. Your company has not adequately disclosed the particular recording and transmission capabilities of the smart meter, or the extent of the data that will be recorded, stored and shared, or the purposes to which the data will and will not be put.
10. Electromagnetic and Radio Frequency energy contamination from smart meters exceeds allowable safe and healthful limits for domestic environments as determined by the EPA and other scientific programs.
I forbid, refuse and deny consent of any installation and use of any monitoring, eavesdropping, and surveillance devices on my property, my place of residence and my place of occupancy. That applies to and includes “Smart Meters” and activity monitoring devices of any and all kinds. Any attempt to install any such device directed at me, other occupants, my property or residence will constitute trespass, stalking, wiretapping and unlawful surveillance and endangerment of health and safety, all prohibited and punishable by law through criminal and civil complaints. All persons, government agencies and private organizations responsible for installing or operating monitoring devices directed at or recording my activities, which I have not specifically authorized in writing, will be fully liable for any violations, intrusions, harm or negative consequences caused or made possible by those devices whether those negative consequences are justified by “law” or not..
This is legal notice. After this delivery the liabilities listed above may not be denied or avoided by parties named and implied in this notice. Civil Servant immunities and protections do not apply to the installation of smart meters due to the criminal violations they represent.
Notice to principal is notice to agent and notice to agent is notice to principal. All rights reserved.
Signature
Smart Meters are the same as wiretapping... which is illegal in all 50 States. Refuse your consent!
Benefit Concert for the Old Hancock Hotel, Saturday October 22nd 12 noon on, To assist with short term expenses related to well and boiler ruined in Hurricane Irene. Please come and help this community center keep its doors open!
Why is it that some corporations manage to get away with fraud, misconduct, toxic pollution, child labor and human trafficking? The answer lies in concentrated power without checks and balances. What is needed for a city and a world without corruption is decentralization of that power.
“Government cannot create jobs. What good government can do is get out of the way, respect the rule of law, refrain from acting in the interests of large corporations and special privilege. This restores our economic freedom, and with economic freedom comes jobs”
–Robert Wagner, 10/15/2010, Addison County Chamber of Commerce Forum
Click the vegetables above to learn how to protect our traditional rights to farm, here in Vermont. Courtesy of the Vermont Coalition for Food Sovereignty.
Aln8bak: Newsletter of the Cowasuck Band
Fascinating and in depth reading on many topics from history to traditional culture to plant and animal lore to commentary on issues that contemporary Abenakis face
Black Market Politics
Another good site that explains how Vermont got the best Legislature that money can buy.
Carolyn Baker: Speaking Truth to Power
Prepare to live in a post-industrial world: not only physically but emotionally, socially & spiritually. Carolyn’s Vermont Tour: 9/21-9/25
Food Sovereignty
We The People, stand on our rights under the 10th Amendment to the US Constitution and reject such Federal decrees, statutes, regulations or corporate practices that threaten our basic human right to save seed, grow, process, consume and exchange food…
Green Mountains Homesteading
“I am as Resolutely Determined to Defend the Independence of Vermont, as Congress are that of the United States…”
Kick Them All Out Project
A practical & powerful way to take control of your legislature away from special interests
SCALING THE PEAK
A BLOG ABOUT PEAK OIL AND A FAMILY ATTEMPTING TO COPE
Shasta and Goliath: Bringing Down Corporate Rule
it would refuse to recognize corporate personhood, explicitly place the rights of community and local government above the economic interests of multinational corporations
N'Dakinna Cultural Center & Museum
…to provide a Cultural learning center for Native Americans in Vermont as well as anyone who wishes to learn about the heritage of The Vermont Abenaki
Web of Debt
Our money system is not what we have been led to believe. The creation of money has been ‘privatized’…
Featured Video: Green Blooded
Green Blooded: Vermont at a Crossroad from Teo Žagar on Vimeo.
Produced by Christopher Piana & Teo Žagar, Music by Bow Thayer.
to be released in 2012 by Vermont filmmakers Teo Žagar & Christopher Piana
of Longshot Productions, and is sponsored by Rural Vermont, “activating, advocating and educating for living soils, thriving farms & healthy communities”.
Žagar’s original film about Slovenian Independence, Ten Days Ten Years was shown
in its entirety the evening before for early arrivals, and will be reshown periodically at the Center for Vermont Independence.
In 2012, I’m going to be a grandpa. Folks, it takes something like this to broaden your perspective… and now it’s personal for me: I am strongly opposed to Vermont taking federal money, because it’s borrowed money that my grandchildren will get stuck paying back. Deprived of the opportunities that I had, simply because of one short-sighted, greedy generation.
This is why the Legislature’s spending like there’s no tomorrow… on police surveillance, tasers, drones, mobile camera vans. And now ‘Smart Meters’… which wiretaps every house that gets one, but it’s GREEN. Actually it’s a scam. Smart Meters violate our rights under the US and Vermont Constitutions. Automation allows the utilities to lay people off!
