Another mayoral election is underway in Burlington. And with it! Another opportunity to decide which flavor of “Runaway Ego” suits the voter. This isn’t meant to be a dig at front-runners Emma Mulvaney-Stanak For Mayor and wealthy realtor Joan Shannon — just at Councilor Shannon 💓, a divisive Democrat who is probably the least popular local politician of the decade, after her mentor, Miro Weinberger.

Mayoral egos are fine; probably necessary. Everyone has egos. Certainly this writer, aka “Jonny Wanzer For People Who Finished College”.

But for those of us who have outgrown the need to personally enjoy the disposition of our leaders (@ Bernie Sanders), the question becomes : what sort of socioeconomic goals, moral vision, and collaborative skills are behind the mayoral ego? What concrete effects will come along with that insufferable, condescending trait of Thinking You’re The Smartest Person In The Room?

Perhaps, as the smartest person in this room, I can offer some insight. 😇

1. Joan of Narc

For landlord advocate and recreational sailing enthusiast Joan Shannon, we can start with the the record of Weinberger, her political Bhagwan. Both have proceeded through Burlington politics with approximately zero regard for those who think differently.

Pick any contentious issue of the last decade. KBTL. Ranked choice. BLM. Palestine. Anything. Look at council minutes from that time. There is no correlation between public input and the actions of the Weinberger caucus — Weinberger + acolytes Shannon & (corporate lawyer) Chip Mason. This officious group clearly decides its course of action in back rooms, with input from wealthy donors but not average voters.

The Five Biggest Fails of Mayor Miro Weinberger’s Tenure

Contrast this approach with someone like Democratic Councilor Karen Paul, a rival of sorts who Shannon defeated in the primary. Paul shares many (incorrect 💓) views/votes with Shannon. But Paul has exhibited, at times, a higher-than-average desire to understand opposing views; integrate them; and allow them to influence her course of action. Not Shannon!

Isn’t it appropriate that Shannon’s sailing vessel of choice is the Laser, a one-person vessel that allows the operator to simultaneously be skipper, engineer, navigator, helmsman, trimmer, and crew without having to consult or collaborate with other humans?

The most extreme example would be “The Pit”. Shannon & Mason were pep-rally-flag-wavers (behind cheer captain Weinberger) of Don Sinex’s botched mall project. Here is a picture from 2014 of Joan Shannon literally cheerleading Sinex, alongside a youthful, dare I say “twinky” 😳 Weinberger.

Voters did not want this project. It happened anyway, possibly related to the fact that Sinex, an out-of-state cartoon villain I profiled back in 2017, represents the billionaire class. And then the project didn’t happen. And then it did. And then it didn’t. And then it did. Eventually our fave Ayn Rand Acolytes realized they’d been played by someone way out of their F.A. Hayek League. But not in time to prevent a decade-long Hole occupying the center of town.

interlude:

Not to harp on the sailing, an irrelevant class war dig (although Shannon’s “All Hands on Deck” slogan begs)….……..but isn’t it appropriate that Shannon’s sailing vessel of choice is the Laser, a one-person vessel that allows the operator to simultaneously be skipper, engineer, navigator, helmsman, trimmer, and crew without having to consult or speak at all with others ?

Anyway. The issue of the day is not Shannon’s imperious, Lone Wolf temperament. Or her cozy relationship with landlords and real estate developers. Or the alarming lack of Black people in her press photos. It’s her coziness with corrupt cops and her use of right-wing crime scare tactics !!

2. Law & Order

In a 2022 New Yorker essay entitled “G.O.P.’s Big-City Scare Tactics”, Peter Slevin explores the historic Republican tactic of “portraying Democratics as soft on crime”.

It is a repeat of an old Republican gambit: when in doubt, scare people, particularly white people. At the heart of Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy was his effort to brand himself as the “law and order” candidate, a title that Trump later adopted for himself. Alongside images of urban riots and protests against the Vietnam War, Nixon declared, in the voice-over to a 1968 campaign ad, that freedom from violence is “the first civil right of every American.” Twenty years later, George H. W. Bush accused Michael Dukakis of being soft on crime, spotlighting the case of Willie Horton, a Black inmate who raped a white woman and stabbed her boyfriend while on furlough.

In Burlington, Joan Shannon is at the front of this parade. Like many Democrats (& Republicans) , Shannon puts forward a narrative that Burlington Crime & Public Suffering is the result of the (stupidly-named) “defund” movement; and the Progressive Party that was sympathetic to it. On her campaign website, Shannon says:

Accountability is essential, and our community can no longer tolerate open drug use and drug dealing, graffiti, car theft, bike theft, retail theft, gun violence and other harmful behaviors in our parks, in our neighborhoods, and in our downtown.

As the only candidate for Mayor who has a record of consistently supporting, protecting, and investing in public safety, and vocally opposing misguided efforts to reduce the number of police officers on patrol in Burlington, I have the credibility to continue to work toward rebuilding our diminished police force. This will include focusing on recruitment efforts and continuing to modernize policies and procedures that ensure high standards of accountability. I will work towards rebuilding trust and relationships between the police department and the community.

Three facts off the bat:

1. The Burlington Police Department budget is higher than it’s ever been.

2. More Democrat city councilors voted in favor of the infamous 2020 “defund” resolution than against it.

3. The Police Department starved itself to numbers way below those set by “Progressives”, effectively doubling the desired cut through a hiring freeze that was either stubborn, incompetent, or both.

And a fourth : CRIME HAS GONE DOWN IN BURLINGTON since the police force reduction. Repeat : crime has gone down. So, wtf are we even talking about?

Radley Balko, in an analysis of Burlington crime data from recent years, writes:

I can’t prove that Burlington is a better or safer city with fewer cops. But there’s even less evidence to support [the] contention that the city is suffering because it has fewer cops — or that it would be better and safer with more.

Is Burlington, Vermont suffering a crime wave because "woke" officials cut police funding?

Reality is hard. Speaking of local celebrities looking twinky, here is a better analysis than is available elsewhere:

Joan Shannon aligns herself with multiple local interest groups who have converged on these (racialized) right-wing crime narratives. Least palatable among these allies would probably be the Burlington Police themselves, represented in the public relations sphere by their (annoying) union, the Burlington Police Officers’ Association (BPOA).

Crime Seen: Long-Term Data From Burlington Police Show Overall Decline

3. “Hey You Got Your Joan Shannon in my Police Brutality!” 😫

In September 2018, white Burlington police officers attacked local Black men on back-to-back nights. This past year, the city agreed to pay one of these victims, Jérémie Meli, $750,000 in damages.

The pair of assaults was part of a larger trend which I highlighted in a 2019 essay, “A Brief History of Police Brutality under Burlington Police Chief Brendan del Pozo.”

A Brief History of Police Brutality under Burlington Police Chief Brendan del Pozo.

Del Pozo, who once wrote an academic paper in support of racial profiling, resigned later in 2019 in the midst of an online bullying scandal, in which he used a fake Twitter account to harass residents. His successor lasted less than two months before being ousted for the same reason, as described in a New York Times article headlined “Yet Another Vermont Police Chief Quits Over Fake Social Media Account.” (ANoTHer DOpE HEadline appeared in USA Today in 2015 : “Burlington Confirms Chief Despite Racial Writings”) 💓

The only good to come out of the whole situation (other than del Pozo leaving) was this iconic, extremely meme-able photo of Weinberger announcing the departure.

It later came to light that Weinberger knew about the online bullying and kept it under wraps. Joan Shannon also had a close relationship with Chief del Pozo, brokering real estate deals for him and recusing herself from his confirmation vote (as described in USA Today) due to their coziness.

3. “You Used To Call Me on My Cell Phone” 🤳🏻

In 2021, Shannon was pranked by protestors who called her cell phone 200 times during a city council meeting. According to Seven Days:

Shannon called the police the following day to ask if the behavior could be considered a crime. “I wanted to know who did this,” she said. “It seems like there should be some consequences.”

She didn’t stop there.

In the following months Shannon used countless hours of government resources, including the Burlington Police Department, the Community Justice Center, and the Chittenden County State Attorney’s office, to punish and silence these activists for “disturbance of the peace/disorderly conduct by telephone or other electronic communication.” This crime comes with a penalty of no more than 3 months in jail, a fine of no more than $250, or both.

One activist said:

“This experience has only proven to us that our thoughts and fears of councilor Shannon and BPD were true,” said one. “Shannon for months has been suggesting that crime in Burlington is sky-rocketing and the police force is underfunded and understaffed, however she is still able to personally ask BPD to investigate pranks calls, and they will do it… Other public officials in Vermont who identify as Queer and/or BIPOC [such as Kiah Morris] receive death threats and receive no police involvement when these incidents happen.”

Indeed, Shannon has been the favorite city councilor of conservative police for the past decade. It would be cynical to call the relationship “transactional”. But we could certainly say it “goes both ways”. In one direction, Shannon offers officers unflinching sustenance in the face of a national movement for racial justice and police reform. In the other direction, Shannon gets support from police; and personal protection from being bothered by citizens.

Before I make some sort of bad-faith dig about the Burlington Police union (BPOA) being a “Police Brutality Coordination Club”, allow me to say that some of my best friends are police officers. (Well. People I know.) So I’d never imply that “a few rotten apples spoil the bunch”. In fact, I have it on good authority that many of the more mellow local officers are not aligned with the adversarial approach of dictive combatants like former BPOA president Tyler Badeau.

In 2021, Badeau called Progressive Council President Max Tracy “selfish”; then accused him of being racist against white people.

Max … has prioritized BIPOC voices, so anyone with a dissenting opinion that’s contrary to his own will likely be pushed down to the bottom. I’m not a person of color. Therefore, according to Max Tracy, my opinion is not equally as valid.

Sucks being white. Badeau called racial justice measures, offered in response to multiple aggravated assaults against Black citizens at the hands of police, “radical and dangerous”. He continued,

It is blatantly apparent that the progressive caucus of this council are only concerned with the selfish pursuit of their own interests which come at the expense of public safety. We have watched as the Mayor and his administration, on multiple occasions, have offered plans to find common ground. Not only do Progressive Councilors refuse to even try and collaborate, they actively seek its failure. We’ve seen this with the budget in June and we are witnessing it yet again, tonight. Police discipline must remain apolitical. What the progressives seek is a police agency that upholds their party doctrine, not the constitution or equal protection under the law. This is not governance for the people by the people. This is activism with an agenda.

Later that year, in June, Badeau issued another screed in response to public criticism around racial policing, lecturing Black (& White) people about “modern policing”.

If our members had followed the above public suggestions, made by those who it would seem know very little of modern policing, and simply followed him to his destination, it is reasonable to believe that the outcome on January 7th could have been far more tragic for an innocent bystander to this event.

Nice. Like a number of other officers disgruntled by calls for change, Badeau ultimately quit, recently telling the Saint Albans Messenger “I didn’t leave the city. The city left me.” 🙄

In 2022, the Officers’ Association wrote a letter to “The Progressive Caucus”.

The BOA would like to applaud the Mayor’s Office, many members of the City Council [Shannon] and the Community at large for their efforts in assisting our rebuilding and changing the harmful narrative that nearly crippled our body and public safety in this City. Now this is not stated to hold the City and our Community hostage…

…but we are going to quit and/or stop responding to crime for a while because our feelings are hurt by the national movement to protect Black people?

Burlington Dispatchers Blame 'Defunding' for Slow Police Response, Crime Victims Say

A 2020 press release called efforts to discipline violent officers “repression”.

It’s not even their (incorrect 💓) views so much as their approach. (Also the murdering). These guys charge through thorny, intersectional issues with the temperament of a 75-year-old man yelling at a Verizon store employee. Except he’s in full combat gear. The combination of misplaced anger and state-sanctioned assault rifles is…bad… and casts a shadow on all interactions with the public, racially charged or otherwise. Perhaps that is related to the chaotic chasm between cops and most citizens.

But many still view racial justice reformers as the villains and police as victims, in need of constant affirmation to grease their public safety wheel (in addition to the signing bonuses, housing support, and childcare). Joan Shannon’s public safety platform states:

We must show our officers that city leadership and the general public support them in performing their jobs according to their training and directives.

Maybe the problem is that Black isn’t being nice enough to Blue.

In 2023, the Officers’ Association glowingly endorsed Shannon in her Democratic primary race against Karen Paul (Not not a punishment for Paul’s support of BLM).

The BPOA is honored to endorse longtime Burlington City Councilor Joan Shannon in her mayoral campaign. Joan has been an ardent, consistent and thoughtful advocate for the City of Burlington since she first took office in 2003 and the BPOA strongly supports her bid for Mayor. In the face of a Public Health and Safety Crisis, decried by the Burlington City Council last month, Joan is the only Mayoral candidate to unwaveringly support the Burlington Police Department and its’ [sic] officers. During the height of social-political turmoil, and well-deserved National conversations on policing in America, Joan refused to arbitrarily defund the Department despite considerable public pressure. Joan recognized, very fortuitously as events over the past three years have shown, that doing so, without a cogent, researched and cross-aisle plan to mitigate the requisite public safety gaps and plummeting officer-staffing levels, would be a very damaging endeavor. This is not a track-record that can be claimed by any other mayoral candidate. Karen Paul voted in favor of the Progressive led effort to decrease the number of police officers from 105 to 74, further demonstrating Joan’s distinct position in this race, and her consistent and thoughtful approach to governance and leadership.

Nothing could make me want to knock doors for Emma more.

🌀

Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger is the perfect Neoliberal. He marches in the Pride parade while incessantly gentrifying neighborhoods he does not live in. He waxes philosophic about Racial Equality and his multi-racial (white-parented) family, while sh!t-posting Black activists who dare ask for material change. He drives a Tesla, probably likes Condoleezza Rice, probably has an Anthony Fauci action figure, and projects a vibe somewhere between WALL-E and Data from Star Trek. He seems to be getting somewhat hotter as the grey hairs of fiduciary responsibility set in. That could be me. But if I wanted a Thatcherian Sugar Daddy to take me golfing, I’d pick someone with more money.

Alas! Instead of either being a Top Tier Silver Fox, or leading from a place of courage and moral vision, Miro obsesses over wonky Excel measurements like the city’s municipal credit rating. He’s less concerned with metrics surrounding income inequality. While some sleep on the streets and others struggle to feed their children in the midst of soaring unemployment and business closure, the mayor focuses on how rich the city is, overall, with staunch supporters like the Scully & Pomerleau families sitting on hundred-million-dollar fortunes, calling in favors when needed.

Weinberger, a graduate of both Harvard and Yale, certainly never tracked as “A Man of The People” to begin with. But the bleeding pandemic economy has exaggerated the disconnect between our Luxury Mayor and the people he claims to represent. At the same time, he finds himself in the wake of a number of awkward embarrassments, scandals, and accusations of corruption. With a fourth election coming up in March, Miro is in the unfamiliar position of fighting for his job. He faces his toughest challenge yet — a Left and Left-Center coalition supporting cutest & nicest City Council president Max Tracy; a socialist-leaning crew poised to return the city into the warm, body-odored embrace of the Progressive Party, which originated in the 1980s under none other than Ornery Hannaford-Shopping Granddad Bernard “Mittens” Sanders.

Miro Weinberger came to power in 2012, when a close-knit group of (white) Ivy League transplants decided that Burlington could use an injection of Reaganomics, and 37 more buildings that look like this:

At the time, Seven Days described the election as a “changing of the guard”:

In place of the old-school Progs and veterans of the city’s social service organizations is a cabal of mostly fortysomething professionals with advanced degrees and young children — many of whom, like Weinberger himself, moved to Burlington a decade or so ago to raise families.

Weinberger’s campaign was managed by his Yale classmate Jessica Nordhaus. It included high-end lawyer and fellow “Yalie” Ian Carleton (go Bulldogs!); U Penn economics department graduate Dawn Moskowitz; and fossil fuel industry veteran Paul Sisson. In the shadows was former Yale & Harvard bestie Samantha Power, who went on to become the literal U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, once called Hillary Clinton a “monster” while working for Barack Obama, which is awesome, and has been a friend of Miro since the two announced baseball games together at Yale, before becoming roommates as each pursued advanced degrees at “a little school in Cambridge” with $40 billion.

The behind-closed-doors narrative is more blunt than Seven Days. Working class Burlingtonians saw Miro’s team as cocky, elite, out-of-state liberal elites who wanted a stable, wealthy city for their children to grow up in, without much regard for the city’s history, or those at its margins.

One could wonder why Preppy Technocracy was ever appealing, in the first place, for the city that spawned Ben, Jerry, & Bernie. The simple answer is that the Burlington Left was knee-capped circa 2010 by the gross mismanagement of wayward mayor Bob Kiss, the subject of a 2011 Seven Days feature asking “Has Bob Kiss Destroyed The Progressive Party?” It would not be simplistic to say that Miro Weinberger was elected as a smart, simple businessman who could clean up the city’s finances. And he succeeded, for a while.

But when the time came for the mayor to establish a legacy beyond fiscal housekeeping, he discovered inside himself a dearth of inspiration. His attempted legacy project, an ambitious-but-somehow-still-boring rehaul of the Burlington city center, failed in epic fashion due to its fatal flaw of being reliant upon the good will of NYC vulture capitalists.

Simultaneously, the Progressive Party rebuilt. Like Bernie 40 years prior, Burlington activists gathered steam, intent on stopping a “Democratic machine”. Challenger Max Tracy’s tenure on city council coincides with Miro’s tenure as mayor. At first, Max, who can be donated to HERE, cast some lonely votes. But after big “Prog” victories in the past two elections, he’s no longer alone in standing up to local Liberal elites.

With the election weeks away, I thought I’d do my “comrades” a solid and review some of the dumbest shït that’s happened at City Hall in recent history. Without Further Ado, May I Present, The Top 5 Fails of Miro Weinberger’s Mayoral Tenure!

#5: The Botched Appointment of Obvious Douche Ian Carleton!

Upon being elected in 2012, Miro Weinberger set to work appointing his “gifted” friends and like-minded elites to serve alongside him. His first weeks were not enjoyed by all.

There was criticism of the mayor’s unilateral decision to create a brand new position in his office for fellow centrist Carina Driscoll; and criticism of the $10,000 raise given to chief-of-staff and Dartmouth product Mike Kanarick (Go Indians!).

“I was optimistic that Miro’s administration would be a fresh start, but, to be honest with you, it’s laden with cronyism,” said Republican Councilor Paul Decelles at the time.

Max Tracy was also concerned. Responding to the unilateral shadow maneuvering that would become Weinberger’s hallmark, Tracy said, “I’m not opposed to him making the necessary reorganization to be successful, but I just think if he’s going to be changing the structure of city government, he should be justifying it publicly.”

But most significant in this dOpE introduction to Weinbergian Non-Transparency was the blowback for his appointment of “best bud” Ian Carleton as City Attorney.

“Could Miro Weinberger’s honeymoon be over so soon?” asked Seven Days. “When Burlington’s new mayor nominated friend and political adviser Ian Carleton to the post of city attorney two weeks ago, he called on the city council to vote on the appointment this Monday. But instead of getting a new job Monday night, Carleton got a grilling from skeptical city councilors. While formal consideration of the nomination was postponed, councilors raised tough questions during an informal session with Carleton prior to the regular council meeting.”

In response to inquiry around his proposed $112,000 salary, Carleton told the council how good Yale was.

“I graduated from the best law school in the country. It was ranked number one when I was there and is still ranked number one,” the Yale grad responded. “I come from a very successful private practice right now. The proposal is to leave a practice where I make a great deal more than I would with this city. I’m taking this job out of a dedication to public service.”

Bro. You sound like an a$$hole.

Eventually, Carleton withdrew his name and returned to his corporate practice. Seven Days reported:

Every winter, Weinberger, Carleton, Mike Kanarick and a few fellow fortysomething professionals spend a weekend hiking together in the Adirondacks — sometimes climbing Mount Marcy’s icy, 5344-foot summit.

Apparently the City Attorney’s salary did not leave Carleton enough of a crampon budget.

#4:

Cheerleading the Obnoxious, Useless F-35 Fighter Jet!

Burlington continues to have the pleasure of being part of the dumbest, most expensive, most drawn-out saga in the recent history of our nation’s immoral military-industrial complex: the F-35 fighter jet, “jack-of-all-trades and master of none”! “For over two decades, the F-35 has been the symbol of everything that’s wrong with mammoth defense contracts,” wrote Popular Mechanics a few years back.

Everyone hates those planes. They’re unbelievably loud. They cost $35,000 an hour to fly. And they immediately conjure a nukey, War Feeling that Burlington residents believe they shouldn’t have to feel every day, since we don’t live in the Balkans. Over the years, Miro Weinberger has played a completely unnecessary role as a cheerleader of this effort, waging credibility on misleading statements for no obvious reason other than a possible future run for state-wide office. In light of the F-35 being “one of the most derided and controversial warplanes”, it’s a weird bus to hop on. But here we are!

The issue was more of a toss-up during the planning stages, with People Who Still Believe In This Nation feeling patriotic in that “Pearl Harbor” way, and almost everyone agreeing that the anti-plane activists were annoying “Cheech & Chongers”, wasting their time with an issue way, way above the heads of Burlington residents — people who never left after Jerry died and whose minds were blown by the sudden existence of a second City Market. Well — who’s laughing now? The weird old hippies with the clipboards! That’s who. Not really. They’re as retraumatized by the planes as the rest of us!

Since the F-35 has (finally) entered service, it’s basically impossible to find someone in town, other than the Trumpers, who supports the plane. But Miro has been an unflinching supporter. “After his constituents passed a ballot resolution calling for an alternative mission to the noisy F-35, Weinberger announced that, for the first time in his tenure, he would not sign off on a citizen resolution,” said VTDigger in 2019 in an introduction to an interview with the mayor. Here is a great excerpt from that interview, discussing Weinberger’s misinformation around how much louder the new planes would be.

MW: In my reading of those noise maps, I think my description is accurate. It is modest and inconsistent in that the noise maps, in some areas, will have less impact whereas other areas show more impact. And while the exact area of this 65-decibel line, which is what drives your projection, shifts — it brings more homes in it — I think calling that a modest change is accurate.

VTD: It’s modest to say that it’s tripling? It’s going from 819 homes to 2,640 by 2023? How is that modest?

MW: You’re really twisting, I think. You’re relying, by saying tripling… [pauses]. I don’t think it’s an appropriate place for us to have a big debate about this.

This is a bit of a weird one, as it sits at the crossroads of municipal and federal power. Those two domains don’t often hang — Miro Weinberger doesn’t really have any affect on the decisions of the U.S. military, though perhaps he’d like to some day. It is actually for this reason that I consider the planes to be such a fail for the mayor. Weinberger didn’t have to put chips on either side. But he did. And it was on the side of something everyone hates.

I have a theory about that. I wonder if the mayor’s F-35 Stanning relates to larger ambitions of running for state office. I don’t think he’s a viable candidate for, to grab one hypothetical, Peter Welch’s seat (if Welch runs for Pat Leahy’s seat). He’s too snobby & too slick for rural Vermont, which also has an anti-Semitic streak, though that didn’t stop Bernie, though Bernie has a different vibe. Anyway. If Miro thinks that is a possibility, he might want the sort of Patriot Points gleaned by getting behind some Flamin’ Bald Eagle Stuff. Who knows! But it’s a bad play as far as it relates to this election.

#3:

Going To Bat for Racist Narc Brandon del Pozo

“Can Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger Survive a Social Media Scandal?” Seven Days asked a year ago, in a feature on the [Rejected Parks and Rec Story Line] surrounding the Burlington Police Department’s seven-layer implosion. The (most recent) trouble began in summer 2019, when Chief Brandon del Pozo, an absolute villain in Burlington Recent History, was asked to resign, after getting caught shit-posting Local Lefty Charles Winkleman on Twitter using a fake account. To be fair, shit-posting Local Lefty Charles Winkleman is a universal impulse in Burlington politics, due to his Angry White Boy approach to activism.

But the fake Twitter episode shined a light on the larger issue of social media surveillance. Worse, it called into question the already-questioned honesty of both the Chief and the Mayor, who were caught in a series of lies about who knew what, when.

In December 2020, this culminated with del Pozo snitching on his former boss, stating, in a deposition, that he had told Weinberger about his fake account — and planned Twitter bullying — before he even sent the tweets. The mayor had previously maintained that del Pozo had clued him in a few weeks later, after getting caught. Brandon also disputed his Ivy League buddy’s claim, made to reporters in 2019, that he had asked for the chief’s gun and badge.

“I will go on the record and testify that that is not true,” del Pozo said. “My badge was never taken and my gun was never taken, and I cannot emphasize enough that that is inaccurate reportage.”

Trouble at the Adirondacks cabin!!!

“The actions by the Mayor and their impact on our community is a reminder of why we need transparent, thoughtful, and principled leadership in the Mayor’s office as well as the need for expanded community oversight of the police,” said Our Next Mayor Max Tracy.

“I just can’t imagine how any members of the public can trust him,” said activist Jaz Mojica about Weinberger after the story ran. Ya.

All of this would look extremely bad if neither of the characters were racist a$$holes. But (at least) one is! del Pozo, whose name means “of the Pozo,” has an absolutely bonkers history of participating in the worst sort of policing. I’ve written about how much he sucks in previous essays.

In 2001, the Chief Who Never Should Have Been published an absolutely absurd, terribly reasoned, thoroughly racist essay in The Queensland University of Technology Law and Justice Journal, in which he argued that racial profiling is more helpful to society than affirmative action.

In the essay, del Pozo creates a fictional racist protagonist, improbably named “Trooper Riggins”, who does a better job than other officers because he uses racial profiling.

Trooper Riggins doesn’t merely hunt for speeders, he uses speeding to hunt for drugs and guns. He uses observed violations to target a certain group of people: likely drug dealers. For this reason, he doesn’t waste the time in his tour pulling over little old ladies with a lead foot, or white men in family sedans. He prefers the rental cars and the flashy, high-end imports driven by the black men who, in his experience, are more likely to be couriers of illegal narcotics and firearms.

Some have asserted that he is intruding on the lives of fifteen good people for every five he arrests, and that his success rate is higher than most. He points out to them that every single person he pulls over is violating a traffic law, so he has the right to stop them in the first place. If things check out and he does not suspect drugs, he is courteous and often issues only a warning. When he finds a big cache he feels like he’s doing his part to help poor, crime-ridden inner cities for which the drugs were destined: he is making it incrementally harder for dealers to addict the citizens around them. He is helping to spread the word that being a drug courier is a risky proposition and hopes it gives people pause when they consider doing it…

…Now take the example of a group of black militants who have been ambushing police officers in an effort to combat what they think is social injustice, as happened in New York during the 1970s….

Del Pozo’s point, which takes 12,000 racist and sophomoric words to arrive at, is that racial profiling seems unethical due to “skepticism about the police’s ability to employ racial profiling judiciously and in a good-faith manner,” but that, in fact, “using race in the effort to apprehend criminals is in many cases an ethical and effective method.”

It is with this attitude that del Pozo championed two absolutely immoral, certainly unconstitutional policies while with the NYPD — “Stop & Frisk”; and the surveillance of random mosques after 9/11.

This history was, needless to say, concerning, when Weinberger presented del Pozo as his choice to replace Schirling, who was asked to step down while facing a lawsuit surrounding the death of local resident Wayne Brunette, shot to death by Burlington police in 2013 while wielding a shovel while in an extreme psychological state.

A Change.org petition from appalled residents read:

We should not be looking to take any pages from the problematic culture of the NYPD, which has led surveillance against Muslims and people of color, unconstitutional Stop-And-Frisk program disproportionately targeting people of color, and is routinely (and demonstrably) violent in their relationship with people of color. This appointment signals, not a step forward in police-community relations, but an entrenchment in ideas that have no place in our Burlington community. With growing communities of Muslims, new Americans, and people of color, Brandon Del Pozo’s record disqualifies him from the position for which he is appointed.

Local Black activist Mark Hughes, of Vermont Racial Justice Alliance, said, at the time:

“Every time I step in this city I’ll be under his jurisdiction. Give it some time. Don’t make this decision tonight.”

Of course, Miro Weinberger and his allies had already made their decision, in back rooms, like always. After Democrats pushed del Pozo through confirmation despite strong objection, a USA Today headline read “Burlington confirms chief despite racial writings.” Great look for us.

Nine months later, in a chilling repeat of the incident that had pushed Schirling out, del Pozo’s department murdered another person in mental health crisis, shooting Ralph “Phil” Grennon to death after breaking into his apartment on College Street, where he was suffering alone.

Del Pozo’s department went on to assault numerous white, and especially black, bodies, with the mayor signing the checks. Said Seven Days,

Weinberger brought del Pozo from New York City to Burlington. He stuck by the chief throughout his tenure, even in instances of intense public pressure.

It is somewhat absurd that a dumb social media episode was the chief’s undoing, after his participation in so much racism and violence. But the culture Brandon curated soon entered the spotlight as the focus of protests against the city’s complicity on racial justice. Which brings us to:

#2:

Playing The Victim When Black People Die

“The mayor has shown no political will or intestinal fortitude,” said Mark Hughes this summer, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the national #BlackLivesMatter protests, which materialized locally with scores of residents camping in Battery Park and marching down Church Street, along with hundreds of other residents, every night for weeks.

The protesters demanded that politicians go beyond hollow promises and explore tangible changes to the city’s bloated, scandal-ridden, racist police force, which searches black people four times as often as it searches white people. Here was a moment for Miro Weinberger to take a stand! To step outside the technocratic box he created for himself as an unfeeling defender of the socioeconomic status quo! To set the record straight for a city currently being sued by three black brothers who were abused by the violent officers whose names were being chanted in Battery Park. To make the world a better place for his non-white daughters, as activist Keren Sita powerfully asked in a Zoom coffee hour this fall.*

*before being interrupted by the aforementioned Walking Dad Issue, Charles Winkleman :)

Instead, the mayor pitched his own tent, as it were — on the side of the police. On the issue of continuing to employ violent officers Corrow & Campbell, Weinberger wrote:

To pursue separation agreements under these circumstances would set an unmanageable precedent that would challenge the department for years to come by suggesting that future employment decisions will be decided not by fair, deliberative processes that are clear to employees at the time, but rather that those decisions will be subject to retroactive reopening by the passions of public opinion.

Classic Miro. It was actually somewhat nice, for once, to hear Weinberger admit his disdain for public opinion, after years of personally living that truth without having it named! In response to City Hall’s flaccid, disingenuous response to the movement for Black Lives, Hughes resigned from his post on the Burlington Police Commission, writing:

This administration chooses not to take action because they are unwilling to accept the cost of doing so. This administration is unwilling to consider that cost that black bodies have paid throughout history, or the pornographic levels of wealth acquired by white people as a result of it.

That week, protesters marched from their Battery Park encampment to the mayor’s front door. The message of the venue — where protesters were entirely peaceful — seemed to be, “the political is personal; this is not abstract.” The mayor responded with a countertactic in which he attempted to frame #BLM activists as villains attacking his family.

The mayor called the protest a “direct action directed at my daughters,” who ostensibly had arrived home early from an afternoon at the Burlington Country Club pool. Weinberger lieutenant Joan Shannon took the rhetoric a step further, accusing the activists of “terrorizing” the children. In response, Vermont Racial Justice Alliance tweeted:

Don’t even talk to us about terror. That is what Black and brown people can feel daily in Vermont, in real ways.

Yeah. Weinberger had previously attempted to scold activists for “public safety violations.”

“That was a slap to the face,” said Battery Park leader Harmony Edosomwan. “We, the community, have been peaceful. It is the cops that are the danger to us.”

God forbid victims of racial violence upset the Decorous, Starched-Oxford, NPR Vacuum Chamber of Elite Liberal politics.

This episode is a perfect encapsulation of Burlington Democrats’ “Clinton” approach to social justice — cashing in brownie points for Empty Platitudes About Peace & Justice while refusing to engage in actual conversations about shifting the balance of power towards equality for black people. Instead, “People Who Remember Trayvon Martin” find ourselves in dialogue with rich buttholes who equate black lives with their hurt white feelings, while painting us with the same paintbrush as the Fascist Far Right, using intentional rhetoric such as “reactionary fringe” to refer to progressives, who Father Miro accused of “hijacking” the city in 2017, because they opposed the creation of a giant hole in the center of town.

No matter your politics, it simply doesn’t look good to put a challenging conversation with your kids about the protesters outside next to the brutalization of young black bodies such as Jeremie Meli’s by the militarized police force you “oversee”. It’s become more and more clear that Burlington has a number of residents who believe that “civility” in politics means “never feeling uncomfortable”. This is the whitest shit ever. The “civil” rights movement was not about people being less rude. It was about Black humans being able to go about their lives without being treated like cattle. For rich white folks to appropriate that term and ask for “more friendly suffering” from the lower classes is a slap. Am I allowed to name that feeling? Or should I keep it inside, in a frozen prison of unshared need and unspoken trauma, like the rest of the people with my skin tone, whose grandparents rode the post-Hiroshima bull economy to get rich in the 60s?

Former Senate President Tim Ashe and his partner, Seven Days publisher Paula Routly, might be the First Couple of Burlington Civility. Routly, who published an absolute garbage, disrespectful article about the Battery Park protests, compared protestors to Nazis after they burned copies of the paper in protest. “The individuals carrying out these retaliatory actions are exhibiting the very authoritarian behavior they are protesting,” she said in hilarious fashion, ignoring the essential role that power plays in conversations about free speech.

Just this week, Ashe shared a screenshot to Facebook of the Merriam-Webster (not even OED??) definition of “civility”, didn’t participate in the lively, polite conversation that ensued, and then blocked various cute Leftists like myself, which is a bummer because I thought me and Tim had a sort of sexy tension that was possibly heading towards some sort of action in the Old North Ender bathroom.

And the tendency of Burlington liberals to center the conversation on their own psychospiritual well-being — while others sleep on the streets in winter — speaks to the disconnect between the city’s Progressive Left and its Democratic Center. Those in the Center, who view that position as non-ideological and live to the North, and especially South, of downtown, tend to not have to worry about who is putting bread on the table, and instead spend their time tone policing the people fighting to keep their kids alive.

This is the exact dynamic Bernie Sanders fought in Burlington when he stood up to the “Democratic Machine” led by mayor Gordon Paquette. In a profile of Bernie’s mayoral victory in 1983, The New York Times spoke of his:

“blunt talk about economic grievance and unrelenting effort to inspire demoralized, lower-income voters with promises of true societal transformation. He believed that only a sweeping vision of a better system could summon the kind of grass-roots mobilization he needed to achieve even more modest goals.”

That is what many of us are fighting for — Black people in particular. Those who don’t want structural change focus, instead, on how politely we’re asking for our basic human rights. There’s a name for this — toxic positivity. Here, Happy Friendliness is demanded by people who refuse to address the welfare demands of those with less power. It’s a smile and a structural punch to the gut. This is why, outside City Hall and outside the mayor’s house, we chanted “No Justice, No Peace”. The white elites are still upset about it. Perhaps they’ll listen to their favorite friendly fighter, Martin Luther King, Jr.

I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action;” who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of goodwill is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”

— Letter from Birmingham Jail, April, 1963.

#1: The Pit™!

The worst mistake of Miro Weinberger’s tenure was staking his reputation on ultra-capitalist Don Sinex, a cartoonishly-evil real estate tycoon whose mentor, billionaire Neil Bluhm, was a 1980s contemporary/competitor of Donald Trump. Good!

Sinex “sold a bridge” to the mayor in a way that nobody with less than ten million dollars will probably ever understand. In short, Sinex, guided by Weinberger, purchased the center of the city, made a bunch of promises, realized that it would be more profitable to Do Nothing and hold the property, and then Did Nothing and held the property because he’s rich AF can do whatever he wants. After years, and multiple lawsuits, the center of Burlington is still a hole, known affectionately as The Pit™.

The best way to describe Miro Weinberger’s role in the project would probably be: “tireless advocate’; “unceasing booster”; or, if we may be granted a brief PG-13 field trip, “everlasting fluffer”. Miro & Sinex intentionally bled out the former Square Mall with planned vacancy, before using that vacancy to justify their ambitious gentrification project, peddled to voters by various PACs organized by Weinberger and local Democrats, and sponsored by the likes of Ernie Pomerleau and Dave Farrington, just two average citizens who happen to make millions on the real estate and construction industries.

“The Partnership for Burlington’s Future, as the mayor’s PAC is known, has spent $15,430. Weinberger has sent several emails from his personal Gmail account soliciting donations for the PAC. Although it would violate the city charter to spend city resources on a campaign for the passage of ballot questions, mayors do raise and spend money through a PAC for such campaigns,” said VTDigger in 2016.

Unfortunately, instead of a revitalized town center, we got a hole. Due to economic factors that are a secret (because, capitalism) it proved more profitable for Sinex, who does not live here, to let us hang out with this hole for 4 years instead of delivering on his shiny vision, which was a boring, gentrified New Money playground in the first place, but was at least not a hole.

It’s impossible, demoralizing, and uninteresting to try and keep up with the latest developments of this Monopoly game gone wrong. Sinex was in, then he was out, then he was in, then he was out, then he was being sued, then he wasn’t being sued, and now he’s back in again, but now his spot is getting blown up by unsurprising union busting. Did I get that right, former participant and current non-participant Jane Knodell?

My favorite “sneaky” move was the crane Sinex rented for like 18 months to sit in the middle of the empty site, next to random giant cosplay stacks of metal & plastic, to create the illusion of work being done. Even “Hippy Burlington” is Too Redneck to get fooled by that one, bud.

No, my favorite “sneaky” move was the endless dystopian propaganda for the project, paid for by Miro’s cronies, brought to you by Local Status Quo Regeneration Machine/Newspaper Seven Days. Here’s an advertisement, presented in the font, design, and URL format of an actual Seven Days story, hosted on the Seven Days website:

These Richy-Rich D-Bags put us inside a Black Mirror Episode with literal North Korea Fake News, while condescending to us about neoclassical economics, and then have the audacity to lecture us about “civility” while they pump money into gaslighty astroturf aimed to trick poor people and multiply obscene millionaire wealth to an even greater extent.

“Like the Mayor, I believe that we’ll arrive at the best plan for BTC only by engaging in a transparent, public process that considers a wide range of community needs and ideas,” said Don Sinex in a Weinberger press release in 2014.

You will rot your brain trying to understand this sh!t. Even if you sucked from the teet of Tiny Man Milton Friedman at Yale University, and are therefore initiated into the Greed Cult of laissez-faire economics, you *still* would have had to have been in a series of secret meetings to understand the Godless microeconomic motivations behind The Pit™.

So — don’t worry about it. Grab your bag of Doritos, rip your vape pen, put Third Eye Blind “Third Eye Blind” on the bluetooth, watch the latest Jonny Wanzer video, make vague plans in your mind to start cross-country skiing during Covid, scope your $50 Bitcoin investment, immediately stop thinking about money because you’re in crushing credit card debt, direct your anger at Miro’s Tesla, check your mailbox, open your mail-in ballot, vote for Max Tracy, try and relax, put some lavender oil in the diffuser, pull up some YouTube yoga, and try and breathe some space around the fact that you are never going to be as rich as Ernie Pomerleau, but at least you don’t have an impossibly scary void where your Authentic Self-Esteem should be; an unspeakable feeling of insufficiency that keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger even as the square footage of your investment properties increases exponentially; a bone-shattering, haunting feeling that you’ll never follow through on your promises to your family to go to therapy, but will instead continue to wildly oscillate between grandiose feelings of untouchable power, and ghastly, unspeakable, existentially-dreadful feelings of having Everything but still being impossibly alone.

See y’all on March 2nd,

Eric

*TLDR: instead of doing their jobs as paid de-escalators, police are attacking and killing (black and/or mentally ill) residents in altercations that could have been diffused by an average citizen wearing a football helmet.*

June 15th, 2015

Brandon del Pozo, first choice of Mayor Miro Weinberger, is confirmed as the new chief of Burlington police, despite controversy surrounding his writings in support of racial profiling. Del Pozo replaces Michael Shilling, who stepped down while facing a lawsuit surrounding the death of local resident Wayne Brunette, who was shot to death by Burlington police in 2013 while wielding a shovel during a mental health crisis.

March 2nd, 2016 (9 months later)

Local resident Ralph Grenon is shot to death by Burlington police after barricading himself in his apartment on College Street during a schizophrenic episode.

“It seems like every six months or so, someone with a severe mental illness is being severely injured or killed by police,” said A.J. Ruben of Disabilities Rights Vermont.

“It is repetitive. It’s infuriating to me,” former Vermont defender general Robert Appel told Seven Days. “Why did they have to precipitate confrontation? What about just waiting? What’s the rush? The cops have this warrior mentality. It’s like video games gone live.”

“This whole thing started as an effort to deliver services to Mr. Grenon,” said Burlington police chief Brandon del Pozo.

March 14th, 2019 (three years later)

Local resident Douglas Kilburn dies after an encounter with Burlington police officer Cory Campbell at UVM hospital in which “a few” punches to Kilburn’s face left him with multiple skull fractures.

“It’s not unheard of to need to defend yourself by striking someone in the head,” del Pozo said.

March 25th, 2019 (eleven days later)

Local teenager Phin Brown, who is black, posts a video to Facebook, ultimately viewed by over 20K people, telling the story of his “random” frisking by Secret Service officers and subsequent racially-questionable encounter with Burlington PD.

April 10th, 2019 (sixteen days later)

Douglas Kilburn’s death is ruled a homicide at the hands of Campbell by Vermont Chief Medical Examiner Steven Shapiro.

Del Pozo and Mayor Weinberger begin the behind-the-scenes advocacy (to have the autopsy changed) that will later result in their being questioned before the City Council.

May 3rd, 2019 (23 days later, i.e. today)

Attorneys of brothers Jeremie & Albin Meli, who are black, file a federal lawsuit — alleging illegal detention & excessive force — against del Pozo, officer Jason Bellavance, aaannndddd officer Cory Campbell (puncher of Douglas Kilburn) following a September incident outside JP’s Pub on Main Street that left Jeremie Meli with long-term head injury effects.

September 9th, 2018 (8 months prior)

Within seconds of exiting his patrol car, as shown on body cam footage, officer Bellavance bounces Jeremie Meli’s head off a brick wall as Meli is arguing with bouncers outside JP’s. According to Seven Days, “a thud is audible on the recording. Bellavance grabs Meli’s limp body by the shoulder and drags him away from the wall. Meli’s eyes appear to roll around as he’s being moved.”

September 8th, 2018 (one day prior)

The day before the Meli incident, on the same block of Main Street, officer Joseph Corrow’s body cam records him knocking Mabior Jok, who is black, unconscious. “The video shows a small pool of blood forming on the pavement near Jok’s mouth.” Bellavance, the shift supervisor, was also involved.

May 2nd, 2019 (8 months later i.e. yesterday)

A federal lawsuit is filed against del Pozo and Bellavance by attorneys of Jok, alleging illegal detention and excessive force.

April 3, 2015 (4 years prior)

A lawsuit is filed against Bellavance by attorneys of John Brayshaw, alleging excessive force in relation to an incident at a hot dog stand in which Bellavance broke Brayshaw’s orbit bone and teeth.

The Year 2001

Burlington police chief Brendan del Pozo publishes a racist essay in The Queensland University of Technology Law and Justice Journal in which he argues that racial profiling is more helpful to society than affirmative action.

Yet again, Burlington cop culture is under the microscope after a local teenager was likely racially profiled by federal agents and told to “not make this about race” by the local officers who responded to the scene. Sixteen-year-old Phin Brown called the BPD after being accosted by the Secret Service on his own property. We’re still waiting to find out WTF the Secret Service was up to. Like. Weird.

But, given police chief Brandon del Pozo’s past racist writings, we should not wait to ask questions about what he believes about black people. Nor should we wait to ask the mayor and city council, whose only nonwhite member, Ali Dieng, accused the council of racism in December, to clarify the sort of protection that black Vermonters can expect from their representatives.

“Trooper Riggins doesn’t waste the time in his tour pulling over little old ladies with a lead foot, or white men in family sedans. He prefers the rental cars and the flashy, high-end imports driven by the black men who, in his experience, are more likely to be couriers of illegal narcotics and firearms.”

Three years ago, Mayor Miro Weinberger nominated “cop/intellectual” and Dartmouth Kappa Chi Kappa brother Brandon del Pozo to lead his police force. Del Pozo got the job, but not before significant controversy within the community. 317 people signed a Change.org petition to stop the appointment. There was opposition to bringing the “problematic” — i.e. racist — NYPD culture to Vermont, due to notorious policies such as “stop & frisk” and blanket surveillance of Muslims.

Anti-racism activists were most alarmed at “Guided By Race”, an essay Weinberger’s nominee had written for a law journal that he describes as a “good-faith effort to understand why [racial profiling] has often been put into practice by people who strenuously maintain that they are not racists.” Huh!! Del Pozo makes up a hypothetical story with a hypothetical protagonist, “Trooper Riggins”:

Trooper Riggins… doesn’t waste the time in his tour pulling over little old ladies with a lead foot, or white men in family sedans. He prefers the rental cars and the flashy, high-end imports driven by the black men who, in his experience, are more likely to be couriers of illegal narcotics and firearms.

Fucking what?? Del Pozo goes on to argue that if black and brown people want race to be a factor in affirmative action, they should allow race to be a factor in policing. “Because they are born of such similar logic, racial profiling cannot be rejected out-of-hand by individuals who laud affirmative action.” Double wow. He’s not done.

It is not clear that a black [not a typo — he said ‘A BLACK’] from Beverly Hills is more different from an affluent white than a poor white from the isolated foothills of western Kentucky. Yet the university, and many others like it, are content to [sic] broad categorizations of skin color to be a stand-in for cultural difference in the essential practice of admitting students to their schools. It will be argued that police officers who use racial profiling actually render much more subtle and complex analyses in their decisionmaking [sic] than the law school of the University of Michigan does in its admissions process.

Residents, understandably, were alarmed when del Pozo was presented by Mayor Weinberger. The Change.org petition read:

We should not be looking to take any pages from the problematic culture of the NYPD, which has led surveillance against Muslims and people of color, unconstitutional Stop-And-Frisk program disproportionately targeting people of color, and is routinely (and demonstrably) violent in their relationship with people of color. This appointment signals, not a step forward in police-community relations, but an entrenchment in ideas that have no place in our Burlington community. With growing communities of Muslims, new Americans, and people of color, Brandon Del Pozo’s record disqualifies him from the position for which he is appointed.

At the time, The Burlington Free Press quoted local resident Abdullah Sall:

Sall said he formerly lived in New York City and was uncomfortable with an NYPD commander leading police in Burlington. A Muslim, he alleged that del Pozo and the NYPD illegally surveilled mosques in the New York metropolitan area.“I think he should be running for the director of the CIA instead of being a police chief of this tiny city,” Sall said.

From Seven Days: “Every time I step in this city I’ll be under his jurisdiction. Give it some time. Don’t make this decision tonight,” said Mark Hughes, a black man from Marshfield.

Also from Seven Days, *legit real quote*: “Del Pozo said his wife, watching Monday’s night meeting online from the Adirondacks, told him he didn’t need to put up with the kind of criticism he was facing. He said he texted back that it was all part of democracy.”

Damn! A “Push-back Text” to the wife. There’s leadership right there. That text fucking BEAMED up from the rough and tumble of the Burlington streets, BOUNCED off a satellite (probably owned by someone who owns part of Burlington Telecom now), and STRAIGHT DOWN through the fresh mountain air of the Adirondaks to whatever sort of weekend cabin situation the del Pozos are rocking.

Long story short — Mayor Weinberger’s *Neoliberal City Council Caucus* confirmed del Pozo anyway, with a starting salary of $114,363 (see: Adirondak cabin). Seven Days said “Burlington City Councilors Stand By Their Man”;

…while the USA Today headline read “Burlington confirms chief despite racial writings”. There’s a good look for us.

I guess it’s not so surprising that the mayor and council would look the other way at racism given:

— their all-white makeup at the time.

— the accusations of racism from Ali Dieng since he became the first nonwhite member.

— the extremely tone-deaf response to Dieng’s comments from The Insufferable Joan Shannon, who centered her own white feelings by tweeting, "I don’t think we have an obligation to vote yes based on the skin color of the maker of the motion…your statement is untrue and I take great offense to it, as anyone would.”

Just. Joan. That’s not how you do it. Ask either of the two newly-elected, cute AF Progressive councilors for help next time this happens (hint — don’t say anything).

Of course Shannon was not the only councilor to approve del Pozo. Indeed, Burlington City Democrats have proven extremely willing to shelve social concerns to save more bandwidth for their primary concern, which is, of course, hand-holding out-of-state Corporate Real Estate Bros. Should they have been focusing on a less sketchy police force instead?

Burlington’s cops have, of course, come under significant scrutiny in recent years for habits such as murdering mentally ill people in their own apartments, and, a few months back, drinking confiscated beer a la Super Troopers. Lol.

I even personally have some fucking WILD stories to tell from my own experience being the target of an FBI-type investigation into anti-racist graffiti. I come off looking…pretty dumb? Also charming? The cops come off looking…extremely repressive? Oddly also charming? Anyway. Things aren’t great for @onenorthavenue overall.

But — for now — let’s just focus on these two things:

1. Burlington Chief of Police Brandon del Pozo wrote racist things in a peer-reviewed, published essay.
2. Burlington police search black people at a rate THREE HUNDRED AND FIFTY times the rate at which they search white people.*

*according to a 2017 study conducted by Professor Stephanie Seguino of UVM and Professor Nancy Brooks of Cornell.

Now I’m not putting myself on the same cerebral level as Intellectual Heavyweight And Probable Racist Brandon del Pozo. But I’m gonna say that (1) and (2) are related. And that our city government needs to focus less on letting Rich White Bros dig holes in the middle of town and more on protecting black people from their own police force.

Burlington Democrats are bad. Vote them out.

1.

Even before the Weinberger-Sinex downtown mall plan went south faster than an Adam Roof Tinder date*, Burlington was just about done with its city council. In recent years, a neoliberal caucus — led by the mayor and made up of City Democrats, former Progressive Party member Jane Knodell, & others — has repeatedly put the interests of Out-of-State Capitalists ahead of the interests of People Who Live Here. Time and time again, this group of aspiring senators/governors have ignored waves of constituent input while selling off an impressive series of community resources to the highest bidder.

*😃 hi Adam #LivesBeforeDecorum

From local cooperative Burlington Telecom to the actual center of town, these nihilists have made neoliberal privatization their — in Yale University terms for Miro — raison d’être. Now, with a *dope* hole in the center of our city and an out-of-state millionaire biding his time because that is what is profitable at this moment, our Reagan Republican council leaders have a strong visual representation of what they are about — frozen nothing.

2.

On March 5th, we have an opportunity to reject this New Normal and begin a return to community-based governance by electing Progressive Party candidates in all four districts:

• Perri Freeman in the Old North End!
• Kienan Christianson in the New North End!
• Jack Hanson in the East!
• Mohamed Jafar in the South End!

(Ward Maps and voting details here)

You can read all about specific issues and proposals on the candidate websites, linked above. There are some really cool ideas being put forward. I won’t do y’all the disservice of poorly summarizing them here, in an essay that is mostly about insulting Elite Burlington Democrats. :)

But — yes! These four young leaders are bright, thoughtful, way classier than me; would never make jokes about a city councilor’s Tinder presence…….and are ready to begin the arduous process of returning to the People-First vision that, through Mayor Bernie Sanders and others, is our Burlington heritage.

AND! Unlike insufferable Democratic incumbent Joan Shannon, these Progressives don’t run their campaigns on large contributions from Hilariously Rich White People such as:

• Russ Scully, the dude that bought the Blodgett Factory in Lakeside for $14 million ($14,000000).
• “Real Estate mogul” Ernie Pomerleau, protector of one of the largest fortunes in Vermont history (above $100 million according to the elder Pomerleau).
• Pat Robins, who is sitting on many millions from the sale of SymQuest, and is a self described “card carrying high handicap golf fanatic”.

I mean…if you are sitting on millions of dollars, it’s clearly not in your interest to support the Progressive Party. As your lawyer, I would recommend looking into Burlington Democrats (or honorary member Jane Knodell in the Old North End).

For the rest of you! Tuesday! March 5th! Progressive Party! Do it.

(Ward Maps and voting details here)

3.

Okay. Back to how horrible Burlington Democrats are. For those of you who have not banged your head, in recent years, against the wall of our unresponsive municipal government — here’s some (200% unbiased) background:

• We used to have a radical mayor named Bernie Sanders.
• Unsurprisingly, his policies were people-driven and pretty awesome.
• His legacy survived for a while under the banner of the Progressive Party, with mayors such as Peter Clavelle.
• Thennnn:
• Things got sticky under Mayor Bob Kiss; investments in the city’s Burlington Telecom asset got weird; city leadership sneakily loaned themselves money from the city’s general fund, got caught; and a new crop of local Clinton Democrats took advantage of the moment, elected Miro Weinberger, and brought a new era of technocratic bond rating management into City Hall.

These neoliberals sought to — in my own words — apply White Bro Reaganomics to our city to increase their personal 401K yields, pad résumés for future political/economic ambitions, and minimize the number of homeless people their children had to look at.*

*😃 #LivesBeforeDecorum #NotSorry

Weinberger campaigned in 2011 with a close-knit group of Ivy League graduates who saw themselves as bringing a dose of realism to a naïve, utopian populous. At the time, Seven Days described this shift as a “changing of the guard”.

Last week’s inauguration of Burlington’s new mayor Miro Weinberger signaled a changing of the guard at city hall. In place of the old-school Progs and veterans of the city’s social service organizations is a cabal of mostly fortysomething professionals with advanced degrees and young children — many of whom, like Weinberger himself, moved to Burlington a decade or so ago to raise families.

This new-to-town yuppie crew, which, for the record, featured 100% white members, was managed by Miro’s Yale classmate Jessica Nordhaus (go Bulldogs!). It included fossil fuel industry veteran Paul Sisso; U Penn economics department graduate Dawn Moskowitz (Go Quakers?); aaand high-end lawyer and fellow “Yalie” (by way of Columbia) Ian Carleton* (go Bulldogs/Lions!)!

*Ian Carleton! What’s up? I nicknamed you “Tartare” Carleton in my head! I hope that’s chill.

So, “Tartare” Carleton ended up being the Mayor’s OG choice for City Attorney. Buuut that shit fell apart somewhere between him asking for too much money and him *being an asshole* about asking for too much money. It ended up being a pretty great representation of the new administration’s “vibe”.

In response to questions about the his proposed $112,000 salary, Carleton TOLD THE COUNCIL HOW GOOD YALE WAS.

“I was optimistic that Miro’s administration would be a fresh start, but, to be honest with you, it’s laden with cronyism, in my view,” said Councilor Paul Decelles at the time.

According to VT Digger, there was criticism of the $10,000 raise given to Mike Kanarick in the chief of staff position. But most significant was the blow-back for Weinberger’s appointment of “Tartare” as City Attorney. From Seven Days at the time, in a piece impressively titled “In Burgeoning Bromance, Burlington Mayor Taps Best Bud for City Attorney”:

Could Miro Weinberger’s honeymoon be over so soon? When Burlington’s new mayor nominated friend and political adviser Ian Carleton to the post of city attorney two weeks ago, he called on the city council to vote on the appointment this Monday. But instead of getting a new job Monday night, Carleton got a grilling from skeptical city councilors. While formal consideration of the nomination was postponed, councilors raised tough questions during an informal session with Carleton prior to the regular council meeting.

In response to questions about the his proposed $112,000 salary, Carleton TOLD THE COUNCIL HOW GOOD YALE WAS:

“I graduated from the best law school in the country. It was ranked number one when I was there and is still ranked number one,” the Yale Law School grad responded. “I come from a very successful private practice right now. The proposal is to leave a practice where I make a great deal more than I would with this city. I’m taking this job out of a dedication to public service.”

Bro.

Eventually, Carleton withdrew his name and returned to his corporate practice. The year before, Seven Days reported:

Every winter, Weinberger, Carleton, Mike Kanarick and a few fellow fortysomething professionals spend a weekend hiking together in the Adirondacks — sometimes climbing Mount Marcy’s icy, 5344-foot summit.

Apparently the City Attorney’s salary did not leave Carleton enough of a crampon budget.*

*😃

4.

Welp. It’s 7 years later and they’ve done pretttttty good! Our municipal credit rating is BAAAAAAACKKK, meaning we can….borrow more money from corporate banks at lower interest rates…if we….want to….keep selling off all our community resources? Well that makes no sense to me but on the plus side I am pretty sure nobody froze to death in the recent cold snap….I’ve been out of town so I’m not positive….

But enough with the “uncivilized attacks on people who haven’t figured out that money & success do not mean anything if one does not have: a) a vessel inside for authentic self-esteem; b) a working planet on which to live.”

On March 5th, we have an opportunity to reject this New Normal and begin a return to community-based governance by electing Progressive Party candidates in all four districts:

• Perri Freeman in the Old North End!
• Kienan Christianson in the New North End!
• Jack Hanson in the East!
• Mohamed Jafar in the South End!

(Ward Maps and voting details here)

We can be better. Please do what you can. Change starts at home! Burlington Democrats suck! Bye! :)

1. The Actual Issue At Hand

This morning, Reagan Republican Diane Feinstein (D-CA), “formally” announced that she will be opposing Gina Haspel, Trump’s pick for CIA director. Slate tells us that “Republicans Are Trying To Use Gina Haspel’s Gender Against Democrats” — that “Liberals do not want to simply see more women in leadership,” but that her ideals matter.

Wait. So now liberals understand that identity is intersectional and being a woman doesn’t excuse killing brown people overseas with reckless abandon?

Yoooooooooo. Take that opinion back to the 2016 primary.

What about paving the way for brave little white girls to grow up and orchestrate genocide?

Which year? 2016? The year in which *Sexist Bernie Bros* jizzed their Mansplainy Mansplatter all over the internet with statements like:

1. Hillary Clinton is a war criminal?

2. It was wrong when Hillary Clinton sold billions of dollars worth of weapons to shitty-ass misogynist Saudi Arabia to use in their immoral, deadly war against Yemen and celebrated the sale as a “Christmas present” on internal email threads?

3. (Like every other position,) Hillary Clinton believed in torture until she didn’t?

4. Y’all should visit Michigan…possibly?

What about paving the way for brave little girls to grow up and orchestrate genocide??

If liberals understand that there are many type of women with many different identities and ideologies that intersect and sometimes supplement each other in one general direction of power; and other times clash and cancel each other out in certain ways…thennn what the hell were y’all talking about in 2016? Do better.

2. Your Boring Meta-Analysis

People who like weed but hate poor people! Hello! Forget the *arguments you don’t have* against what I just said. Let’s interrogate my conscious and subconscious motives!

PLEASE tell me:

a) I am obsessed with Hillary;

b) that my tone suggests I dislike women or women in power;

c) that we must look to the *future* and not the past;

d) that we are wasting time “re-litigating”.

Those are great lines for people who believe the system works just fine and we just have to, pick up, move along, play by the rules, stay classy, and let our democracy — with a little help from the invisible hand of the free market — do the rest.

But! For those of us with actual analyses of power. Who aren’t:

a) checked out;

b) gullible;

c) addicted to greed and/or status and/or power;

d) waiting like a naive lover for the DNC and DCCC to stop manipulating us…

We will continue to use the 2016 presidential election as the *perfect* story of what happens when Establishment forces flail around, waste money, and choose *letting someone like Donald Trump win* over *giving up control of anything*.

Many of us fought to avoid that outcome. We continued to fight against Trump after the primary was over. We continued to stand up for vulnerable people on Day Fucking One while Hillary was wandering around in the woods. It’s obvious why you want us to ignore that piece of history. We’re keeping it.

Why wouldn’t we?? The 2016 primary is the fable illustrating the disingenuous impotency of Blue Neoliberalism. To put in Hillary terms. It’s a shale gas treasure trove; a fracker’s paradise for those who wish to turn the Democratic Party into an entity that cares about people more than profit.

It doesn’t mean we don’t have work to do on the Left to dismantle the shit-ass white patriarchy that we were raised in and reverberates in us all. It does mean that you can’t bring us down with a lazy “Bernie Bro” barb. See you at the polls.

I am proud to announce that I am part of the team — and larger movement — to elect Infinite Culcleasure our next mayor of Burlington. My support is deep and nuanced; but also simple. I believe Infinite:

1. Shares an analysis of structural power that is unflinching.
2. Sees public service as a responsibility, not a career opportunity.
3. Has extremely valuable experience and perspective in a number of ways but also specifically as a black man in America.
4. Represents a true grassroots alternative who can ignite demographics who haven’t participated politically in recent years because they haven’t felt seen or heard.

For these reasons and more, I will be doing everything in my power to make sure Infinite is elected our mayor on Tuesday, March 6th, 2018.

Infinite Culcleasure For Burlington Mayor

I’ve gotten to know Infinite over the past year as many of us on the Left have met to explore ways to organize for true social change in Burlington. I like Infinite very much as a person. I trust him to do what is right. I am inspired by his life story. I love that he is a musical artist. I believe in his ability to rise to this challenge.

Our campaign is one outcome of a movement rooted in many human lives and areas of social justice. This particular energy congealed around:

1. Opposition to specific corporate development projects such as Don Sinex’s downtown mall;
2. The Black Lives Matter movement;
3. The successful City Council campaign of Ali Dieng;
4. The founding of Burlington’s Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) chapter;
5. And, more generally, disgust at the neoliberal status quo that sees regular Burlington residents — as always disproportionately women, people of color, and queer folx — struggling to provide for their families while others prosper.

Needless to say we are dismayed not only with selfish Republicans but also with Democrats, locally and beyond, who might say the right things but lack the vision and conviction to lead us out of our societal tailspin.

For those of us fighting to save our species from blind greed, having our eyes open to the full extent of our challenge is required. We cannot afford to ignore the latest climate change reports — even if they are bleak. We cannot afford to ignore the suffering being experienced in places like Yemen by victims of economic and political violence.

I like to to joke about our “Post-Capitalist Hellscape”. But in a very real sense, I believe we need to Get Smart Real Quick to avoid screwing ourselves over on a global scale. To use the cliche, we need to “think globally and act locally.”

Applied to Burlington, this principle means that we need a new mayor. Without taking away from the steadiness with which our current mayor has guided city finances, we need much more than a classical CEO at the helm of our city. Our vulnerable residents need more. Our planet needs more.

We should be inspired by the legacy of Bernie Sanders, who pushed Burlington forward as mayor during the 1980s. We should also see Bernie as the floor — not the ceiling — of what we can accomplish. The bolder our candidates and vision, the more likely we will be to reach the majority of disenfranchised residents who don’t participate in the current system. We need them. We need you.

If you Care About Others but aren’t sure how to help, please check out our website and our Facebook page. Please contact us! We will put you to work! In the meantime — register to vote; ask your friends to do the same; put March 6th on your calendar; stay safe and sane!

Nothing in politics is easy. But I hope you’ll join me in putting it all on the line this winter; and become part of the group who will elect our movement’s candidate, Infinite Culcleasure, our next mayor of Burlington.

If you don’t know what a “spinnaker” is, congrats! — perhaps you viscerally understand the value of keeping community assets local; and can proceed with your day while remembering to support KBTL (Keep Burlington Telecom Local) at Monday’s meeting. If you DO know what a “spinnaker” is — and/or own a 52 degree gap wedge for those tricky 115 yard approaches — and are concerned about us getting sued by Citibank…these may be the answers for you!!

Runaway Capitalists!

1. This is all going to be much easier if you resist the temptation to deflect using ideas you learned in Econ 151. That class sucked.
2. No, really, it was a bad class. Humans are not rational operators. The homeless don’t deserve to starve as a means of training towards acting more efficiently in the marketplace. Our planet is not an “externality”; neither is human suffering. Milton Friedman was a shitbag. Etc.
3. The entire Ting vs. KBTL issue comes down to Burlington being bullied by Citibank. If we weren’t being bullied by Citibank, we could do whatever we want, including keep our public utility public like Burlington Electric. When you press hard enough on the Ting camp — led by Mayor Miro Weinberger and councilors like (corporate lawyer) Chip Mason — it always comes back to “Citibank will sue us!”
4. Which……a) sucks insofar as we are being coerced by a leading member of the [Whoops We Tanked Your World Economy In 2008 Betting On Obscure And Obscenely Over-Leveraged Mortgage-Backed Instruments] mafia;
5. and………b) is extremely vague and therefore being used as a blank check by the centrist Democrats who want to pump up our credit rating in the short term because, to them, [solid municipal credit alongside landlords running wild, service workers making starvation wages, and homeless people dying] is a solid vision of successful community.
6. Dems. Nobody cares that you support gay marriage, buy local and (possibly) use gender pronouns gracefully. It’s Burlington in 2017. We’re talking about money; where it goes; whether to honor our Burlington legacy of elevating those most in need; or sell out assets to rich white dudes; etc.
7. This Karen Paul business is sketchy AF. If there was a conflict of interest, why did it not come up before? Also? Why does this matter to Karen Paul enough to quit her job? Blind passion for free markets?
8. It is unclear the exact likelihood of Burlington being sued by Citibank because it’s being shrouded in secrecy by those in power, who want to use the threat as a battering ram to get this thing done and sold off. But it’s low.
9. It’s convenient that this shit always comes down to a set of obscure rules and (Brennan/Holmes/Harlan) interpretations taught only to the 1% that is incidentally the same set of rules that allowed slavery until like 4 generations ago; Jim Crow laws until the 60s; and in 2017 still sets racist killer cops free.
10. But, using tried and true common sense, we can still assert ourselves by remembering that:
11. WE ALREADY GOT SUED BY CITIBANK AND MADE A DEAL.
12. This whole process was initiated by a previous suit brought against Burlington by Citibank after Mayor Bob Kiss & administration fucked up real bad. There is more information than anyone could want on the BT website here. We already got sued. A settlement was reached. It set the terms for this process. The KBTL bid would not have gotten this far if it weren’t aligned with the stipulations set forth in that Citibank settlement. But somehow at the last minute, we’re supposed to believe vague threats because the people who have the most to gain from the More Money Now Fuck The Future model don’t like the way things are going?
13. If Citibank had different or more exact stipulations this sale, the time for them to assert that would have been BEFORE they signed the original agreement. That’s how settlements work. The KBTL bid meets the criteria set forth. Citibank could tie us up in court by challenging vague language. But that’s what cities have lawyers for!
14. Of the many benefits of keeping BT local, only some are “economic” in the neoliberal sense. We have a human obligation to think about vulnerable populations and, in 2017, social justice victories are increasingly won on the digital battlefield. As progressives we should not restrict ourselves to short-term numbers or Finance Bro goggles. As shown in the work of groups like Cooperation Jackson, the benefits of cooperative ownership transcend the neoliberal paradigm and enter into direct advocacy for racial, social, ecological justice on top of the “strictly economic”. We won’t get sucked into only using neoliberalism to refute neoliberal talking points because to us it’s about shifting the paradigm and not just crunching number differently.
15. HAVING SAID THAT, from a neoliberal standpoint, without even entering other realms….we should hold on to our asset because it is in our economic interest and because we can. I wrote last week about the clear fiscal benefit of cooperative versus profit-seeking ownership.
16. However the cookie crumbles, Miro and at least half of these Democratic councilors are getting voted out in March by actual progressives because people are tired of this city’s time and energy being spent holding the hands of rich white dudes who want to profit off of us and take the money out of Vermont. Either BT becomes a victory the Left coalesces around or a defeat the Left coalesces around. We want all of you to join us and be a part of this. Even if you read Hayek in college. And now would be an especially *dope* time to lay your hand down as opposed to in 5 months when we’re in charge. Bernie defeated a “Democratic Machine” in 1981. His step-daughter might run against Miro in 2018. Tell me this doesn’t feel familiar.

Thoughtful and committed councilors! Tomorrow you vote on whether to keep our internet local as a community asset; or sell it to an out-of-state corporation. I join many of my fellow citizens in asking you to keep it here.

The Ting option, put forth by Canadian corporation Tucows, has been declawed by its proponents to seem friendly and fuzzy. Tucows is a $600 million company. It took in $190 million of revenue in 2016. Its CEO owns $32 million personally. In January it purchased web company Enom for $84 million. This is not a “family operation”. How many families do you know with $84 million kicking around?

We want leadership that values us as human beings and judges our city’s success on those who have the least, not those who have the most.

We heard last meeting about the fiduciary obligations of this council. We discussed whether such duties go beyond short-term dollar math into a longer-term protection of economic welfare. To a clear majority of citizens here — it does. We are not satisfied with numbers printed on paper in the Wall Street Journal. We want leadership that values us as human beings and judges our city’s success on those who have the least, not those who have the most.

We could argue all day about the meaning of “fiduciary duties”; about how far into the future they are meant to look; about how holistic one should be in defining municipal financial obligations. I’m sure one or two Burlington Country Club members will school us on the matter before too long. :)

They’re not bidding on our internet as a charitable endeavor…They’re here to make a profit. That’s not a dig. It’s their literal job.

Instead I’d like to stick to the standard Wall Street definition and focus on the fiduciary obligation of a different group — the seven wealthy humans who constitute the board of Tucows and operate Ting. These decision makers are not bidding on our internet because they have an affinity for lakeside New England towns. They’re not bidding on our internet as a charitable endeavor or a passion project. They’re here to make a profit. That’s not a dig. It’s their literal job.

On Wall Street, the definition of “fiduciary” requires less philosophizing than here in Burlington City Hall. It means that a for-profit company has an obligation to its shareholders to make as much money for them as possible. Prioritizing anything other than the profit of Ting goes against the fiduciary obligation of the company’s leadership. It’s the fundamental tenet of capitalism.

What does Ting’s fiduciary responsibility mean? It means that, unlike our community’s cooperative bid, Ting must, forever and always, place money-making at the center of its decision making. It would be irresponsible of them to operate otherwise. There are times when these decisions will align with our community interest. There are times when they will not.

Ting’s fiduciary responsibility also means that they would not be making this purchase unless it were in their financial interest. The Ting bid is a bet — a bet that, in the long run, their investment will turn a profit.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines profit as “the difference between the amount earned and the amount spent in..operating something.” I might offer my own definition — “money that could have been kept in the hands of Burlington taxpayers instead.”

As easy as it is to point to short-term gain, we should use common sense logic and see that what is best in the long term is cutting the profiteers out of the equation. The extra money above operating cost that Ting is wagering on will eventually leave our community. That surplus is money that, under the cooperative model, would have stayed here in the hands of citizens.

We should place our own bet — a bet in our community; in ability to own and operate our own internet efficiently, in a way that seeks to break even, save taxpayers money, and protect the internet as a social resource; not to make a profit for people who don’t live in Vermont are already rich enough.

We can’t understand this moment without understanding the sketchy financial situation inherited by Mayor Weinberger and his team when they came into power in 2012. Their Democratic administration is the first in this city since 1981, when Gordon Paquette’s so-called “Democratic Machine” was defeated by a passionate, eloquent, kinda-hot socialist named Bernie Sanders.

2012 was also the year our city’s bond rating, after years of optimal credit, was downgraded by Moody’s Investment Services to Baa3 surrounding the mismanagement of Burlington Telecom’s 2007 expansion. Miro set out to restore our financial health through a series of prudent, fiscally conservative decisions. In March of 2016, Moody’s restored Burlington’s bond rating to A3. In March of 2017, they affirmed our A3 credit while upgrading their outlook to “positive”.

When assessing the health of our community, we need to do better than “Wall Street likes us.”

Looking at the mayor’s time in office, it’s clear that the Moody’s credit metric is at the center of his administration’s scope. Using that criterion, his leadership has been an unequivocal success. The sale of Burlington Telecom and accompanying influx of cash would be the cherry on top. But is this really how we want to judge ourselves as citizens?

Moody’s Investment Services, the corporation who assigns us our A’s and B’s, is one of the Big 3 credit agencies who allowed the entire economy to collapse in 2008. The company recently agreed to an $864 million settlement over their role in that 2008 crash, which consisted of fraudulently jacking up the value of mortgage-backed securities, the instruments used by Wall Street to gamble obscene amounts of money they did not actually possess before ultimately tanking the international economy.

Judging ourselves by the standards of credit rating agencies carries its own set of concerns. It might seem ironic to let a risky economic establishment assess our risk. But it’s not. It’s exactly how late capitalism works. They’re not assigning how risky our city’s economy is for us. They’re assigning how risky it is for them —investors with their own profit motives and fiduciary responsibilities. The risk is intentional. It’s the gas in the engine.

As citizens, we ask you, as councilors, to take a wider lens. Please don’t asses our well-being using Wall Street metrics and algorithms. We are complex human beings with complex wants and needs. In 2017, many of those are tied to the internet.

In the Age of Trump, we need to do more than judge ourselves by status quo financial metrics; we need to do more than declare victory using existing Wall Street criteria.

We need to ask ourselves if this late capitalist paradigm is even working in the first place; and if victories within this neoliberal lens apply to the many or just the few.

When assessing the health of our community, we need to do better than “Wall Street likes us.”

Thank you for your time, continued hard work, and devotion to the community members who make up this wonderful city.

Hi. My name is Eric Maier. I live in the Lakeside neighborhood. I’m here to register my disappointment with the amount of city time and resources being devoted to holding the hands of corporate profiteers like those looking to invest in Burlington Telecom, and real estate developers like Don Sinex.

While nobody can doubt the mayor and council’s success in pulling our city out of the financial troubles they were handed, it would be very difficult to claim that recent economic gains have focused on the most vulnerable. Instead, we see our economy transferred more and more into the hands of rich white dudes who know the difference between racquetball and squash.

Which, for the record, include racquet and ball size as well as pace of play.

In the 80s, here in Burlington, we had a mayor named Bernard Sanders. He was elected and re-elected under a platform of working for average people — the many, not the few.

In 1984, the Sanders administration commissioned “Jobs and People: A Strategic Analysis of the Greater Burlington Economy”.

The report looked at the overall health of Burlington, but with a particular focus on the city’s most vulnerable citizens. In the area of economic justice, after years of Gordon Paquette’s so-called “Democratic machine,” the “Jobs and People” study found great room for improvement. While there was economic growth at the top, the report stated:

Most of the residents of Burlington are not participating in the region’s prosperity; those who do are likely to move out of the City. Instead of being leaders and participants in the economic boom surrounding them, [average residents] are relegated to the role of spectators.

The report advocated for “a deliberate strategy of structuring Burlington’s inevitable economic growth to the benefit of all citizens, not just a few;”

and “a drive for quality over quantity, that is, a deliberate preference for good jobs over any jobs at all.”

“Jobs and People”, in remarkable terms, takes very seriously the issue of the under-employed.

The over-educated human ‘surplus’ of the Greater Burlington economy, loosely tied to what they consider to be transitory, ‘dead-end’ jobs and eager for more challenging employment opportunities.

Most of their stories speak of the need for a challenge; for a change to exercise their creativity and skill in a way which their present jobs do not allow. Many leave Burlington not having been able to find the challenges they seek.

The authors of Bernie’s 1984 report treat such workers as human beings with full lives and needs — not simply as numbers. If the compassion of the cooperative approach seems like it’s from another world — that’s because it is!

Such human-focused inquiry seems downright strange at a time when our city government has become a tool for rich people to turn Burlington into a financial playground.

It is demoralizing to compare Bernie’s “Jobs and People” report with the economic study used by the city in its advocacy of the new Burlington Square Mall, a.k.a. “City Place”. Instead of being commissioned by a socialist mayor, the current study was commissioned and paid for by…the developer of the project himself, Don Sinex. So. The numbers quoted by the mayor, President Knodell, and other supporters of the new mall were paid for by the business person who stands to profit most. Needless to say Sinex didn’t close his eyes and choose at random when selecting the study’s academic framework.

Sinex chose Kevin Chiang. Chiang is Professor of Real Estate & Finance at Grossman School of Business — so we know he has experience using complex formulas to tell rich, white dudes that they deserve their money. In fact, Professor Chiang’s primary area of academic interest is in Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs), which is Wall Street speak for “the exact type of financial instrument that triggered the global economic collapse of 2008.

That was almost ten years ago but I am sure the financial crisis sticks with most of you. At the time, in advocating for their obscene bailout, Wall Street types engaged over and over in the kind of condescending, technocratic persuasion in which nobody who didn’t go to an Ivy League business school could understand how to fix our economy. Most people, including President Obama, listened to them, and here we are. Economic inequality is worse than it has ever been. Donald Trump is president. Mega-hurricanes are striking. Ecosystems are dying. Maybe it is time to reevaluate the way we look at, and talk about, our economy. There are alternatives to corporate development; to our present day “Democratic machine.”

We have a legacy in Burlington as being a progressive leader; and a responsibility to show the rest of the country what is possible when the needs of regular human beings are elevated. As much as shrewd economic maneuvering helps our municipal credit rating — if we’re not looking at the most vulnerable citizens, our efforts are morally lacking.
Instead of satisfying ourselves with comfy, neoliberal policy, we should follow the lead of communities like Jackson, MS, and, in the words of the community activists behind the recent election of radical mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba, “replace the current socio-economic system of exploitation, exclusion, and the destruction of the environment, with a proven democratic alternative.”

The group Cooperation Jackson advocates for:

An alternative built on equity, cooperation, worker democracy, and environmental sustainability to provide meaningful living wage jobs, reduce racial inequities, and build community wealth. It is our position and experience, that when marginalized and excluded workers and communities are organized in democratic organizations and social movements they become a force capable of making transformative social advances.

We can learn from cities like Jackson. We can do better here.

Thank you for your time.