Robert Wagner for Vermont Senate 2010

The Role of the Commons in Vermont’s Economy: Do You See the Cat?

I was one day walking along Kearney Street in San Francisco when I noticed a crowd in front of a show window… I took a glance myself, but I saw only a poor picture of an uninteresting landscape. As I was turning away my eye caught these words underneath the picture: “Do you see the cat?” I spoke to the crowd. “Gentlemen, I do not see a cat in the picture; is there a cat there?” Someone in the crowd replied, “Naw, there ain’t no cat there. Here’s a crank who says he sees a cat in it, but none of the rest of us can.” Then the crank spoke up. “I tell you,” he said, “there is a cat there. The picture is all cat. What you fellows take for a landscape is nothing more than a cat’s outlines.” And you needn’t call a man a crank either because he can see more with his eyes than you can with yours. -Louis F. Post, The Prophet of San Francisco

The cat represents the Common Assets of Vermont.

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

• Groundwater: $671 million: Nestle, Perrier, etc.
• Minerals: $96.8 million (2005) Omya (Switzerland)
• Surface water: $7.6 million (mostly Entergy via VT Yankee)
• Spectrum: $375 million to media companies
• Forests: TBD
• Land Speculation: TBD (mainstream economists say land ain’t important)
• Hydropower: 550MW mostly TransCanada

Preliminary estimate: $1.2 Billion per year.

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

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

The astute Vermont politics-watcher may say, but wait, what about the suit against the water bottlers?

Good first step, but it misses the point. Government’s real power, taxation, can capture the revenue of the Commons. We need tax reform today. Failure to reform is tantamount to acting in the interest of those large corporations. Failure means that Vermont gets used as a banana republic.

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

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