Burlington: The College and the Land Deal

The following were remarks to the Save Open Space Summit, on Jan. 21, 2015, at City Hall. A week after this talk I became a candidate for mayor, and proposed a partnership in the public interest to save Burlington College and balance development plans with preservation of open space. 
     More recently, the circumstances surrounding the college's land purchase and eventual closure have sparked an investigation that implicates Jane Sanders and appears to be aimed at her husband, Bernie Sanders, who is poised for reelection to the US Senate -- and another presidential run.

   How did we get here? These days I often ask myself that kind of thing, looking back, thinking about the past. But 40 years ago, when I was new to Burlington, I thought mostly about the future, how it could be different and better.

   About that time I joined the faculty of Burlington College. It had another name then. Vermont Institute of Community Involvement, or just VICI. And one of the ideas of founder Steward LaCasce was to get away from "bricks and mortar" -- the big, expensive, campus-based model of higher education -- and, as much as possible, develop a community-based alternative, using existing resources and spaces around town. It was a practical form of involvement and interdependence. 

   Eventually, the College did buy a building. But the idea of staying small and connected to the community persisted.

   At the time, the land we are here to save was owned by Vermont's Roman Catholic Diocese. The church purchased most of it from Burlington Free Press Publisher Henry Stacy in the 1870s. Before that it was farmland, and the city grew around it. A rolling meadow led to a bluff overlooking Lake Champlain, with a beach below, a forest of oak, red maple and pine at the southern edge, and a railroad tunnel under North Avenue. All in all, it is a special, irreplaceable piece of land.

   The church erected an imposing Victorian building, which housed orphans for a century. After World War II, the local diocese bought adjacent land and converted a cottage into a school for delinquents. After the St. Joseph Orphan Asylum and the Don Bosco School for Delinquent Boys closed, it became diocese headquarters and home for projects like Camp Holy Cross.

    So, the "school without walls" and the cloistered catholic campus near the lake. How did they get entangled? The answer begins with secrets, the first about what went on in the church -- and on that property.

   In the end dozens of former residents came forward, and revealed a dark, sordid history of physical and sexual abuse by nuns, priests and staff. Like other parts of the church, the diocese ultimately found itself under attack and in serious financial trouble. By May 2010, it had paid almost $20 million to settle 26 lawsuits. More were to follow. Selling the land was urgent to help cover up to $30 million in legal settlements for the abused.

    Developers expressed some interest, but disagreed about what the property was worth. There were also zoning restrictions, and some claimed the city was overvaluing the land. In any case, it went on the market in April 2010 for $12.5 million. The sale to BC for $10 million was announced on May 24, 2010, only a month later -- ten days after the diocese paid out $17. 65 million.  Based on about 200 housing units, a plan initially considered, a more reasonable price was probably $7 million or less.

   Why did the college pay that much? And what did its leaders expect? Like many decisions by private boards, it's mostly confidential, a shared secret. But we know the deal was promoted and brokered by Antonio Pomerleau, once known as the "godfather of Vermont shopping center development." Owner of Pomerleau Real Estate, a prominent, devoted Catholic who wanted to help the church, and a powerful, persuasive developer who for years chaired the Burlington Police Commission.

    In the early 1980s Pomerleau became an obvious target for Bernie Sanders, a capitalist mogul who wanted to rebuild the waterfront and controlled the Police Department. His $30 million waterfront redevelopment plan was derailed after Sanders' election as mayor. But the relationship changed. By the time College President Jane Sanders announced the purchase, Pomerleau was considered a family friend. In then-President Sanders' words, Pomerleau was the only man who could have made it happen. Someone to trust, who understood relationships. But it didn't hurt that he loaned the school $500,000 to close the deal. Yves Bradley, who subsequently became chair of the College's Board of Trustee, handled the 2010 transaction details for Pomerleau Real Estate.

   According to local sources, the school's leaders believed that, with connected friends like Sanders and Pomerleau, plus a Treasurer like Jonathan Leopold, handling the $10 million debt and $3 million for renovations was a reasonable expectation for a school with 200 students and revenues around $4 million a year. Big donors would come -- but they didn't. The Board also embraced another notion: that enrollment could double in five years, a goal well beyond the national average. It didn't.

    In retrospect, it sounds like magical thinking. Or just bad judgement. But somehow it made sense -- at least until September 2011, when Jane Sanders was forced to resign, mainly for not raising enough money. So began a three-year, silent slide toward insolvency...

Related Feature Story: Campus Paradise Lost 

Dark Horizons: Navigating Change in Uncertain Times

By Greg Guma
      We're in uncharted territory. On some days, as the West's domination of world affairs winds down, you can feel the wheels of history turning. A multi-polar world seems to be emerging. But so far it looks as polarized, unstable and dangerous as the one it replaces.

      The Trump presidency is meanwhile turning out be even more surreal than the campaign. If you doubt that the foreign policy establishment is concerned, Richard Haass offers a comprehensive, "insider's" corrective in A World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order (2017, Penguin, 352 pages). The message from Haass, who heads the Council on Foreign Relations, is that global rules and institutions that have kept the world relatively stable since World War II are at serious risk of being abandoned. 

      Written during the recent presidential race, Haass makes a convincing case for growing global instability. But he sidesteps a direct critique of Trump, calling instead for continued active engagement (defining it as a "sovereign obligation") over narrow nationalism. It's a sobering viewpoint that reflects the priorities of the internationalists who have controlled US foreign policy for most of the last 70 years.

      Unprecedented. We hear the word so often that it's become a cliche. But have we been here before? And is what we're experiencing an authoritarian surge or something else? In The Anatomy of Fascism (Vintage, 2004, 321 pages) , Robert O. Paxton illustrates the differences between the two isms, and how modern anxieties - from immigration and economic insecurity to urban "decadence" and national decline -- create conditions for mass-based, populist nationalist movements. Fortunately, not many have taken power, or lasted for long.

     Written before the recent surge of nationalist propaganda, hate crimes and "strongman" regimes in places like Turkey, Hungary, the Philippines and the US, Paxton's concise study outlines how fascists gain and exercise power. It also identifies the obvious warning signs: political deadlock in the face of domestic crisis, threatened conservatives desperate for tough allies and ready to abandon the rule of law, and charismatic leaders ready to "mobilize passions" through race-tinged demagoguery.

    On the other hand, he also advises that most real capitalists, even if they view democracy as a nuisance, would prefer an authoritarian to a fascist. The former usually wants a passive, disengaged public. But fascists, who have such contempt for people and reason that they don't bother to justify their excesses, tend to get people excited and engaged. And not just their blame-shifting supporters.   

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      European powers ruled 84 percent of the land and 100 percent of the seas in 1914, and the US was the world's largest economy. What a difference a century has made. Now three of the four biggest economies are China, India and Japan. In Easternization: Asia's Rise and America's Decline from Obama to Trump and Beyond (Other Press, 2016, 307 pages), Gideon Rachman makes a persuasive case that China is poised to dominate the next century. But he also reveals why no "Eastern alliance" is apt to replace the crumbling "West."

    As a top financial commentator for the UK's Financial Times, Rachman has hobnobbed with ministers and business leaders worldwide, and brings some revealing encounters into his analysis and forecasts. The main issue, he explains, is whether the US and China can avoid the Thucydides Trap -- the type of rivalry between an established and rising power that can lead to war. It has happened in 12 out of 16 cases since 1500. 

     Location could be a decisive factor, explains Tim Marshall in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything about the World (Scribner, 2015, 305 pages). For Russia, the largest country in the world, it has made power difficult to defend and provoked leaders like Putin to compensate by pushing outward. For China, in contrast, geographical features have often provided security, and now set the stage for it to become a two-ocean power (Pacific and Indian) and claim most of the South China Sea. 

      Marshall's book is well-organized, fast-paced and reads like a travelogue, observing history, politics and environmental dynamics from a high altitude. The maps in the paperback could be better and the text certainly does not explain "everything." But this is an engaging refresher and does illustrate why, despite having a great location, even America is constrained by geography's rule. 

 ***

     Long before the digital age, the US government used scientists and psychics to locate hostages and penetrate secret military bases. Sometimes it even worked. This is just one of the mind-blowing revelations in Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis (Little Brown, 2017, 527 pages). For decades, such research was publicly ridiculed as science fiction fantasy. But Annie Jacobsen has assembled the facts, from once-classified documents, former officials, and government psychics who explored this frontier.

     Did you know, for instance, that the US military used dowsers during the Vietnam War to locate Viet Cong tunnels? Or that Uri Geller, the famous psychic "spoon bender" who set the CIA's psychic research program in motion, also worked for Israeli intelligence, and later became wealthy locating ancient Middle East artifacts, oil, and minerals for mining corporations? 

     The difficulty with paranormal abilities was often reliability. Even when techniques were refined and endlessly practiced, only a few psychic warriors had the right stuff. Yet the research continues. The Office of Naval Research is currently exploring what it calls premonition or "Spidey sense," while the Defense Research Projects Agency (DARPA) looks into "synthetic telepathy," a brain-computer interface that may someday enable soldiers to "communicate by thought alone." 

     During the same period, with more success, various governments have also been developing cyber capabilities. As Fred Kaplan notes in his riveting new book Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War (Simon & Schuster, 2016, 342 pages), at least twenty nations are already in the game, led by Russia, China, Iran, Syria, North Korea and the US. The focus is currently on Russia's "hybrid warfare," the weaponizing of hacked documents to influence the presidential race. But keep in mind that information war began with the US-NATO campaign against Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic. And the first significant cyber attack, a US-Israeli operation called Olympic Games, was directed at Iran's nuclear program. Later known as Stuxnet, it involved a cyber worm that destroyed a quarter of Iran's centrifuges and set back its nuclear program by several years. 

     The trouble with waging cyber war, warns Kaplan, is that "what we can do to them, they can someday do to us." It's a type of blowback. In an afterword written since the 2016 election, he also points beyond the Russia-Trump operation to the next threat -- denial-of-service attacks executed by thousands of household devices. It happened on October 21, 2016, when an Internet switchboard was flooded, shutting down Twitter, Spotify, Netflix and other sites. 

     "There are now about 10 billion Iot (Internet of Things) devices in the world," Kaplan concludes. "Some estimate that, by 2020, there will be 50 billion. That's a lot of bots to be enslaved for a cyber war."

-- First printed in Burlington's Peace & Justice News (July 2017)

The Making of Black Dawn

Vermont artists and activists Doreen Kraft and Robin Lloyd will screen their 1978 animated film Black Dawn at Champlain College on Wed, July 12 at 5:30 p.m, along with a discussion and showing of original Haitian paintings featured in the work. The following article is from Black Dawn: a Study Guide on Haiti by Greg Guma and Robin Lloyd

In her book, Divine Horseman, American artist and filmmaker Maya Deren described her 1947 trip to Haiti from the perspective of a passionate convert to voodoo. She had visited the Caribbean country to make a film on dance, but once there found that dance in Haiti had to be seen not as an isolated art, but as a central aspect of religious ritual. After attending many voodoo ceremonies, she was eventually "possessed" by the Goddess Erzulie, her camera dropping to her side as she responded to powerful rhythms and felt the "loa" enter her body.

       Almost 30 years later, two other filmmakers, Robin Lloyd and Doreen Kraft, followed in Maya Deren's footsteps and lived in a voodoo temple while developing their own perceptions of Haiti. They didn't experience possession, but they did fall under the spell of Haitian culture. For many of the people they met, the gods were part of everyday experience, the subject of struggle and dreams. Religion was not dogma to these Haitians, it was a lifelong initiation into "the mysteries." 
      The filmmakers also visited art galleries and filmed the painted buses that clog the streets of downtown Port-au-Prince. From this dual interest -- in art and religion -- the film Black Dawn emerged.     

       They returned the next winter with a small grant, the filmscript, and several suitcases full of paint and paper. Francine Murat, director of the Centre d'art, introduced them to artists whose styles or themes were appropriate for the film concept. Some of these artists were among the most skilled in Haiti, others were unknowns. Once the content of a scene was agreed upon, the hard work began: how to explain to artists who had never "animated" before that a number of layers of paper were required to properly animate characters. The Queen would have to move behind a bush, Toussaint would need three heads, each looking in a different direction. All of this was conveyed in French, or sometimes translated into Creole.

      One of the factors that assisted them in their task is the widespread acceptance among Haitian artists of voodoo as a cultural force. Voodoo is called animism in religion textbooks -- a belief system where inanimate objects are imbued with living souls. The word comes from the root word "anima": to breathe life into. And what is film animation but infusing the inanimate with life! The artists quickly began to share with the filmmakers a profound artistic sympathy and excitement for the film project.

      They returned to Vermont with background paintings and characters not yet assembled, just arms, legs and heads scattered across white sheets. They set up a studio and bought a custom-built animation stand modified to handle large paintings. American artists helped in creating transition scenes and special effects. Two Haitian artists obtained visas and worked in the Vermont studio. Haitian writers, musicians and a radio announcer in Montreal gave assistance during the final stages.

      Black Dawn was first screened at the Gala Exhibition of Haitian Art at the Brooklyn Museum in the fall of 1978.

US System Failure: The Presidency Is the Problem

Continuing transfer of power to the executive branch in the United States is a largely untold story of the last half century, abetted by the cult of commander-in-chief authority, a global network of military outposts, a vast intelligence apparatus, the withholding of information on spurious grounds, and a permanent state of emergency... 
      Presidential sovereignty stems from the widely accepted (but utterly erroneous) notion that only a single executive can manage US foreign affairs. At the urging of various private interests, this has led to hundreds of US interventions around the world, often with Congress partially, wholly or willingly kept in the dark. The pattern, which began with President James Polk’s 1846 calculated provocation of war with Mexico, ultimately went public more than a century later with the exposure of a worldwide crusade to arm, train and direct various "contra" forces. It wasn’t “approved” public policy, but it nevertheless has served as a centerpiece of presidential foreign policy since the Reagan years...

       Two centuries after the US constitutional system was created, it has unraveled under the explosive force of the imperial presidency. The framers, though they could not predict the global dominance of the US, were certainly aware of the dangers of a drift toward monarchy. Unfortunately, their handiwork no longer meets the test. Even though the president needs congressional approval for expenditures and declarations of war, almost anything is permissible if the appropriate “national security” rationale can be manufactured...  
       Even impeachment won’t counter the long-term drift toward executive sovereignty, since a president can only be impeached for “high crimes and misdemeanors” while most of the covert or “illegal” actions condoned or promoted by presidents are tried-and-true policies that Congress dare not condemn, criminal as they may be. 
      According to historian Barbara Tuchman, the office itself “has become too complex and its reach too extended to be trusted to the fallible judgment of one individual.” Thus, she and others have suggested restructuring ideas; for example, a directorate or a Council of State to which the executive would be accountable. Ironically, such ideas were discussed and rejected at the original Constitutional Convention.
      Some basic changes are obviously needed. Presidents will continue to seek expanded power until clear limits are imposed and public pressure reverses the trend. In the end, the US may need another Constitutional Convention.

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