Pat Political

What Governor Platform Should Be-3

We presently fund education through property taxes.

Interestingly, if we were to achieve some sort of single payer universal health care system, property taxes for education would be lower immediately, since health care expense for teachers is one of the largest school budget items.

But the real question is whether in our time education should be funded by property taxes at all.

Governor Douglas has said that we should continue to fund education through property taxes because it is traditional to do so.

But at that earlier time ownership of property equated with wealth. And it was an equitable solution to have the wealth of the community pay the costs of education. Today many people own property who are not wealthy.

Wealth today is expressed in income. Once again to let the wealth of the community fund the costs of education would seem the equitable solution.

Therefore a mandatory tiered education tax on all income generated in Vermont, including that of the out of state owned corporations like Wal-mart would seem appropriate.

What Governor Platform Should Be-2

The high property taxes we private citizens and truly local businesses owned and operated by resident Vermonters are presently paying to cover the costs of our infrastructure and education are very much priority issues for any candidate for governor.

Here we discuss infrastructure. Education will be the next topic.

The time when local property taxes funded an infrastructure which was mainly for the benefit of its own community is long past. We pay taxes to the communities in which our houses are. Too truly these are “bedroom communities”. We do our real living where we work and shop, in towns and cities many miles away.

Residents of Burlington and Montpelier are beginning to rebel and are looking for ways to create taxes that will make the many people who come into their cities to work and to shop share in this expense. But it isn’t just the people coming into Montpelier and Burlington who are able to make use of local tax payers. All of the out of state corporations, unless they pay local property taxes, are also getting a free ride from any community which houses them.

Therefore we need to rethink and redefine our understanding of how we are to pay for infrastructure and who is to pay for it..

A mandatory tiered statewide infrastructure tax, based on and distributed to each community according to its needs, which would be levied on all out of state-owned corporations as well as on resident Vermonters would seem to be a good solution.

Local property taxes would then be only to maintain purely local functions such as the town hall, library, etc.

What Governor platform should be

Many of my following posts will be the issues I believe any candidate for the position of governor of Vermont should be addressing. I welcome your comments and additions.

The first concern for any governor should be to protect our election process. I would call it The Young Vermonters’ Voter Protection Act, and it would state that “Vermont elections. local, state-wide, or federal, shall always produce a verifiable paper trail, which physical paper trail shall be held available for inspection by the public by the Vermont Secretary of State for a time equal to at least two election periods for whatever office is involved.”

The second concern should be a “whistle-blower” protection act. No incumbent government likes a “whistle blower” and neither does any business. But courageous people who are willing to speak out when they see something wrong with what is occurring are performing a tremendous public service. They should be protected by law here in Vermont, which presently has no such law, and by federal law.

Sen. Kennedy on Health Care

Senator Kennedy of Massachusetts was the guest speaker for the National Press Club luncheon on January 12th, and his topic was the future of the Democratic Party.

While I myself do not believe the Democratic Party has a future, he did rouse my interest when he began to talk about the need to provide health care for everyone in the country.

His proposal was that we should expand Medicare to include everyone.

My proposal for universal health care here in Vermont would be to expand the Medicaid list using Medicare as a model for the distribution of benefits until such time as Medicare can be used as basis for national health care.

How nice to see that the Senator and I agree on one matter at least.

If you want the details of my health care plan, just let me know and I will send it to you. (pathejny@gmail.com)

Taxes in general

Governor Douglas and Mayor Clavelle have refused to sign any pledge not to raise taxes. This is our only point of agreement. For any governor or president to make such a pledge is fiscal irresponsibility.

President Bush recently likened himself to some of his forerunners, President Roosevelt for one. He certainly doesn’t stand up well in this comparison!

When we went to war in 1941, President Roosevelt immediately raised taxes so that my children would not have to pay the costs of this war. Under the Marshall Plan we provided only what help Germany needed to rebuild its own economy. No ‘Halliburton’ was sent in to do it for Germany and make huge profits for itself in the doing.

But if President Bush is being fiscally irresponsible, it’s sheer fiscal insanity for the generation that is my children’s age to insist on tax cuts and low taxes while at the same time mortgaging their children’s future with such huge deficit spending. When this generation hits old age, how will their children be able to offer them any assistance if this huge deficit is still weighing down the country.

My personal advice to all young people is to get yourselves into all legislatures, state and federal, and start enacting sufficient taxes, while your parents are still young enough to help, to pay off this this irresponsible mortgage of your future.

The real function of government and legislation is to make life in the community better. Taxes should nether be high nor low but whatever is needed.

And taxes should be on real wealth. Ownership of property used to be the measure of wealth but certainly is no longer. For us today wealth is measured by income.

Biomass fuel-- the most important!

Of all the issues facing Vermonters this election, an alternative economy based on biomass fuel is the most important. I sent the following letter to Burlington Free Press's My Turn column yesterday.

I am Patricia Hejny, Independent candidate on the ballot of 2004 for the office of governor.

My first concern when I ran in 2002 was about the increasing number of terrible health problems for our young people from our oil/chemicals based economy. We live in a sort of chemical soup from the pollution of toxic, carcinogenic oil and from the ever-growing number of new chemicals which business is constantly throwing at us. Our immune systems can no longer withstand this assault, and we are seeing a rising number of the immune system failure illnesses such as cancer, MS. lupus, etc.

This year, in addition to health concerns, we see our Vermont local economy threatened with collapse because of the high prices of gas and oil. The more we have to spend for gas and oil, the less we have to spend on local merchants, restaurants, community musical and theatrical events, etc. And there is no likelihood of oil prices coming down. There is increasing competition for the available oil in the world and we are told that reserves are much less than estimated.

We can do something about this.

We can get a local biomass fuel economy up and running

Biomass fuel is from plants which are an ever-renewable source of this energy.. Our other renewable sources of energy-- wind, solar, hydro, methanol-- must be explored, but these are for the generation of electricity, not for fuel.

Diesel engines were originally designed to run on vegetable oil, not petroleum. We can get diesel oil from processing hemp seed oil, and ethanol for our cars and trucks from the fermentation of any waste vegetable material.

Hemp is one of nature’s miracle plants, providing a long list of products from its fiber and offering us today its seed as a base for diesel fuel and biodegradable plastics. We are the only country in the world insane enough to deny .its people the benefits of this wonderful plant..

Restoring hemp to Vermont will give our farmers a cheap and easy to grow cash crop. (And hemp was the most important crop in the Northeast Kingdom prior to 1937) Its fiber can be the base for many local businesses.

The production of vegetable oil and ethanol can lower the price for Vermonters of whatever petroleum oil and gasoline we still have to use, and it can begin to cut back on the pollution we experience.

I am the only candidate offering this solution to some of our problems. For my stand on other issues, such as health care, taxes, education, I urge you to look at my web site http://patpolitical.typepad.com

And I ask you to vote for me on November 2nd.

More on Education

I try to offer solutions whenever I criticize.

And so, since between Ishmael and myself, we were pretty critical of education generally in my post for October 25th, here are some of my thoughts on what can be done to improve matters.

In many ways the one-room schools offered the ideal educational setting. Most of their students came from farm families, or lived near farm families. These farming communities understood very well what was needed to obtain food and farm children by the age of ten had most of the skills needed for survival. Their schooling gave them the basic tools of reading and math which are necessary for exploring the universe of the mind. Such gentlemen farmers as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson had the best educations of their age, versed as they were both in the realities involved in staying alive and in the most exciting ideas of their time.

Today’s schools cannot offer this combination of survival knowledge and abstract learning easily if at all.

How to get closer to the real education they received?

Montpelier’s High School has a project this year of growing vegetables for the school cafeteria in a student built greenhouse. How about similar projects in all our schools.

When I went to school, we were taught real crafts-- sewing, woodworking, cooking, machining. If teaching such real skills cannot be easily incorporated into school programs, how about internships with local businesses.

But the worst thing I know about present schools is that children are expected to sit quietly at a desk for a day nearly as long as their parents’ work days.

Children getting off a school bus should run around the school at least three times before going in to the building. And the first stop should be the cafeteria for a supplement to their breakfasts-- or lack thereof.

I doubt that many of you have read Louisa May Alcott’s Little Men. This book I believe should be required reading for everyone in education and for social workers as well. In it she proposed an educational philosophy which we would do well to incorporate into our policies today.

One of her most important ideas for us today is that periods of physical exercise should be interspersed throughout the school day. How about a break every two hours for one hour of active games, indoor or out, or of simply running around the school.

We worry about obesity in our school age population. Wouldn’t such a change in the school day schedule be one way to cure it?

The above are just suggestions that come quickly to my mind. You must have more or better. I would like to hear them.

Education

I want to see Vermont schools today as good as the one room schools of sixty years ago.

These schools were small enough that the teacher could give each child all the individual attention needed. But they offered something else every bit as important. Because grades 1 through 6 were all together, there was the interaction of older and younger children, older children helping teach and care for younger children. And because of this interaction they all learned how to be responsible, participating members of their community.

In the schools I attended in suburban New Jersey children came into school at the age of five and were shepherded through school as an age group until they graduated at the age of seventeen. There was little or no interaction between age groups except on the playground, and much of this was undesirable.

This is the pattern in our public schools today. Children come from being important individuals in their families to being just part of the group, a statistic in the average of their group by which number we judge the success or failure of their education.

We complain about the lack of interest in their communities, their absorbance in their own perceived interests, their general selfishness by young people today. Isn’t this a system ideally designed to promote such an attitude. As a corrective measure, I would like to see every child coming into kindergarten have a fourth grader assigned to be a sort of big sister/brother to help with adapting to school but especially as a protector on the playground. I recall how fortunate my three younger sons were to have a big sister looking out for them at school.

But the most serious charge against our present educational system is that it does not prepare any child for actually living in our world. There is far too much emphasis on abstract and not nearly enough on practical learning.

I asked one of my grandsons who he thought were the most important people in New York City. His reply was doctors and lawyers. My answer was that the people who know how to maintain the infrastructure, the water, the sewers, the electric lines, the telephones, garbage collection, were the most important because without them, the doctors, lawyers, and everyone else could not function. And since everyone needs to eat, aren’t the farmers who provide our food the most important of all? Can an educational system that never offers anything as basic as how to provide yourself with food be called adequate.

Have you read Daniel Quinn’s My Ishmael. In this book, published in 1997, he gives a thorough and devastating critique of our present way of educating our children. (There is a precis of his remarks at www.womansvoice.org. Click on the Children and Education button, and then on My Ishmael.)

Ishmael first points out that any child in any primitive society is given an education about everything that child needs for survival, even if the rest of the community should suddenly vanish.

Could any young person in our society survive on what our education provides if the rest of us should suddenly vanish. Could you yourself survive on what your education has given you, even if you went on to college?

I know that I couldn’t.

Youth for Democracy

Yesterday I was contacted by a young woman from Youth for Democracy who asked me to fill out a survey for them..

Here are their survey questions and my answers to them:

1. What should young voters know about you? Why have you chosen to run?
I ran in 2002 and I am running again in 2004 because of my dismay, as a grandmother, about the terrible pollution and increasing health problems that are resulting from this pollution. And this year I add my concern about Vermont's local economy, which is greatly endangered by even higher costs to us for gas and oil. The more we all have to pay for fuel for our cars and trucks and for heating, the less we have to spend on our local businesses. This can only hurt your parents' ability to do what they would like to do for you, and your chances of being able to make good lives for yourselves here in Vermont.

2. What are the three most important things that your candidacy can
do for young Vermonters?
As governor I would work for getting a biomass fuel economy going in our state, which could cut both the pollution and the expense of carcinogenic gas and oil in half for all
of us.
I would urge the changes in our election laws which would mean more meaningful elections for you as you become voters-- instant run-off voting for local elections (IRV), and proportional allocation of our Electoral College votes.
I would work to get universal, single payer health care going in our state.

3. Would you support lowering the voting age to 17 or 16? please
answer "yes" "no" or "possibly"
Yes (I have talked to so many 16 and 17 year-old young people who are as or more knowledgeable about our state and its needs as their elders.)

4. How do you plan to stay connected with the youth of Vermont if you are elected?
Well, if I am not elected, I would like to volunteer to help with Youth for Democracy in any way I can. As governor it would be easy for me to keep in touch with what is being done in schools and various youth groups to make sure you are getting what you need to be
responsible, functioning members of your community.

More on issues

One of my issues is electoral reform. It’s pretty certain that at least half the country will be unhappy with the results of this presidential election no matter who becomes president. I hope that every state will consider reforming their electoral college laws to reflect their local voting.

For Vermont we should do what is necessary, either an amendment or a law, to change from winner take all voting to proportional allocation of the popular vote in the Electoral College and instant run off voting (IRV) in our instate elections.

Let me make clear my position on abortion. I have never known a woman who has at her side a loving, supportive man need to ask for an abortion.

Where are the men who have caused the pregnancies of women who tell us they cannot be a mother to this new life.

People who tell me they are anti-abortion also tell me they are very pro-family. Why then are they not pursuing the very anti-family men who rape, commit incest, or are simply irresponsible. Until they do go after these men, I consider their position hypocritical, and I remain firmly committed to the right of any woman to decide whether or not she needs an abortion.

People have asked me how I feel about guns and capital punishment.

A gun is the other lethal weapon which is very much a part of Vermonters’ lives. How about our cars. We have no trouble requiring someone who wants to drive a car to get a license that indicates a minimum capacity to operate it. And we have no trouble requiring ownership registration of cars. Guns should be treated in the same way. And to go further I would encourage the same sort of gun education in schools that is presently offered for driving cars. My education in handling guns was from a boyfriend I had when I was about ten. I was pretty good and I have always regretted that I never had the opportunity to do more.

I am totally opposed to capital punishment. This is simply an act of revenge. To spend all the rest of one’s life behind bars for a crime of violence, so that one has to go though all of the changes in heart and mind that inevitably come and have to contemplate this single act that has kept one from having a real life is a far more severe punishment than death.

Channel 17 has now posted our governor candidates’ forum on 10/18 on their video streaming program list. This is a wonderful service they offer, providing the opportunity for everyone to take a look at some of the candidates for office we might not otherwise get to see. The web address is www.channel17.org/seeitnow.html.

VPT is also giving us a chance to see and hear all of the candidates for governor talk about issues in the TV spots they are showing throughout the month of October.