BRATTLEBORO — Vermont has elected socialist Bernie Sanders statewide 11 times, and twice voted for him in the Democratic presidential primary. But there's not too much socialism here.
Like the other 49 states, Vermont has socialism for the rich and rugged individualism for the poor. The opioid epidemic ravages our communities, but the leading opioid dealers in the country donate to our politicians - including thousands from Purdue Pharma to Gov. Phil Scott - without a peep.
The state Legislature has proved itself incapable of effecting access to health care beyond the Affordable Care Act Medicaid expansion, nor of going after the fossil-fuel capitalists bringing our planet to the brink of an ecological crisis that we may never return from.
More than 60,000 Vermonters live below the poverty line. More than 180,000 have experienced food insecurity in the past year. Housing costs are astronomical, with Vermont being the 12th highest in the nation for cost-burdened households, at 48 percent.
Can one state be different from the other 49?
Our neighbor immediately to the north, Quebec, has a significantly expanded welfare apparatus compared to the other Canadian provinces. So, too, does Mexico City compared to other Mexican states; Scotland and Wales, as opposed to England; Berlin, as opposed to the rest of Germany; Kerala, as opposed to the rest of India, under similar federal constitutional systems.
Until the mid-'70s, New York City's welfare programs looked closer to western Europe's than the programs offered even in upstate New York.
The problem is not that we are swimming against the tide. The problem is that our elected officials are swimming with the tide.
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I've been thinking about this lately with a little more force than usual because my brother, Antoine Cunningham-Cook, died of an opioid overdose at the end of January, leaving my 5-year-old nephew without a father. It was an unmitigated tragedy, and my family is just starting to pick up the pieces.
Antoine's story is far too common in Brattleboro and Vermont more broadly, with more than 100 additional opioid deaths in the state in 2020 alone. His death was not an individual failure but a public policy decision, an outgrowth of a 45-year class war of the 1 percent, including Vermont's 1 percent, against everyone else.
The 1 percent made the decision to market opioids. They made the decision to deindustrialize via NAFTA and institute permanent normal trade relations (PNTR) with China. They made the decision to artificially restrict employment via tight money monetary policy and poor financial regulation at the Federal Reserve.
The 1 percent wants us to grieve individually and see our conditions as unique when, in fact, they are far too common.
We need a public grieving, and accountability for those who created the conditions for such grief, if we are going to move forward.
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The 1 percent has not been challenged by Vermont's elected officials, besides Bernie.
Despite overwhelming Democratic majorities in the state Legislature, they have not raised taxes on the rich to fund expanded social services, they have not addressed the housing crisis, they have not cracked down on opioid companies, and they have not addressed the ecological crisis.
They have not raised the minimum wage to $15 per hour. They have not developed ways to reduce our prison population and the sending of millions of taxpayer dollars to CoreCivic, the largest private prison corporation in the country.
Our own state senator, Jeanette White, as chairwoman of the Government Operations Committee, has been the leading force in the Legislature blocking ethics and campaign finance reform, despite Vermont's D-minus rating on corruption - a ranking that goes a long way to explaining our other public-policy problems.
U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy voted for NAFTA and for PNTR with China, which sent millions of jobs overseas to places with far-worse labor and environmental protections than the United States. He has never apologized, and he even voted for the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement in 2011, which ensconced a trading relationship in a country that is the most dangerous in the world for trade unionists.
Topping even that sordid record is U.S. Sen. Peter Welch, who was trading opioid stocks while working to gut the Drug Enforcement Administration's ability to crack down on opioid suppliers(!).
Meanwhile, the opioid deaths have continued to pile up, and Welch is still one of the most active stock traders in Congress.
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Our own Senate president pro tem, Becca Balint, whom I have known for a long time, posted an interesting op-ed on VTDigger a few weeks ago about racial justice, wherein she and House Speaker Mitzi Johnson call on Vermonters to “stand up against prejudice.”
Meanwhile, Balint, the Senate president pro tem and a member of the three-person Committee on Committees, has kept Sen. Jane Kitchel (D-Caledonia) on the Appropriations Committee as its chairwoman. For the past decade, Kitchel has blocked a people's budget and other progressive policy items that could have kept my brother and hundreds of others alive.
Now that she's in power, will Becca Balint take real action on racial justice, like rent control, a $15 minimum wage, a real independent investigation into the opioid crisis led by people with an adversarial posture to corporate power, and a termination of the CoreCivic contract?
Time will tell. It certainly won't happen unless there is accountability.
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How can we change this?
I highly doubt that it can happen with the current crop of politicians (save Bernie and some others, like state representatives Mollie Burke and Emilie Kornheiser).
What we need is an explosion of working-class people running for office in our state - turning, as U.S. Rep. Ayanna Pressley says, the people closest to the harm into those closest to power.
We need politicians who are financed by working class people instead of the wealthy, and what we need most of all is socialism, or caring for one another via public policy.
We can be a state that embodies the Good Samaritan, one that requires organization.
And to organize, we need to talk to each other. Please feel free to reach out at [email protected].