The Role of the Commons in Vermont’s Economy

Jan 112011

Do You See the Cat?

Do you see the cat?

I was one day walking along Kearney Street in San Francisco when I noticed a crowd in front of a show window… I took a glance myself, but I saw only a poor picture of an uninteresting landscape. As I was turning away my eye caught these words underneath the picture: “Do you see the cat?”

I spoke to the crowd. “Gentlemen, I do not see a cat in the picture; is there a cat there?”

Someone in the crowd replied, “Naw, there ain’t no cat there. Here’s a crank who says he sees a cat in it, but none of the rest of us can.”

Then the crank spoke up. “I tell you,” he said, “there is a cat there. The picture is all cat. What you fellows take for a landscape is nothing more than a cat’s outlines.”

And you needn’t call a man a crank either because he can see more with his eyes than you can with yours.

-Louis F. Post, The Prophet of San Francisco

The cat represents the Common Assets of Vermont.

What are the Commons? The Commons are land, natural resources, anything that people did not create. The Commons can be held in the public trust, or they can be privatised. There’s a lot of taxable revenue from natural resource extraction in Vermont, over $1 billion per year, but our legislature won’t touch it. The people of Vermont get no benefit from our natural resources. Follow the money:

Groundwater: $671 million: Nestle, Perrier, etc.
Minerals: $96.8 million (2005) Omya (Switzerland)
Surface water: $7.6 million (mostly Entergy via Vermont Yankee)
Public Airwaves: $375 million to media companies
Forests: TBD
Land Speculation: TBD (mainstream economists say land ain’t important)
Hydropower: 550MW produced for Massachusetts without compensation to Vermont (TransCanada collects the tax-free profit from this)

Preliminary estimate: $1.2 Billion per year or $7,700 per Vermont family of four, every year.

That’s what’s being given away. Montpelier’s subsidy to rich corporations.

Why… is a good question. UVM already presented the evidence to the Legislature, but they ignored the evidence, choosing not go up against the likes of Entergy, TransCanada and Nestle. This alone, is an excellent reason to vote these Democrat/Republicans out of office and bring in Independents, who are free to act in the best interests of Vermont.

The Independent candidates intend to recapture the lost revenue of the Commons. This is not some revolutionary manoeuvre, this is what Norway and Alaska already do. Nigeria, Somalia, Iraq do not. Get the picture yet?

The astute Vermont politics-watcher may say, but wait, what about the ‘bottle bill’? Good first step, but it misses the point, and don’t let the House Ways & Means Committee think they’ve done their job. Government’s real power, taxation, can capture the revenue of the Commons. We need tax reform today. Failure to reform is tantamount to acting in the interest of those large corporations. Failure means that Vermont gets used as a banana republic.

There’s no reason for this so-called Budget Crisis in Montpelier. There’s no reason to cut services. Don’t believe the budget hype. See the cat.

More on the cat later as well as the game of Monopoly… stay tuned!

Who was Henry George? Click the pic to find out!

The fact is that the work which improves the condition of mankind, the work which extends knowledge and increases power and enriches literature, and elevates thought, is not done to secure a living. It is not the work of slaves, driven to their task either by the lash of a master or by animal necessities. It is the work of men who perform it for their own sake, and not that they may get more to eat or drink, or wear, or display. In a state of society where want is abolished, work of this sort could be enormously increased.

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