American Devolution: Talking Decentralism

‘If the New England states formed their own pact and began to separate themselves from the decisions of the federal government wherever they can and formed, in a sense, a resistance alliance, we might be at the beginning of a decentralization process.” — Greg Guma, 2025

On October 10, 2025 I spoke with author and publisher Jim DeFilippi on his video podcast, Blue Smoke and Black Ink, about my upcoming novel, The Trials of Celia, available Nov, 26, 2025, and experiences managing Pacifica radio almost two decades ago, described in detail in previous books, Managing Chaos and Planet Pacifica. But then the discussion took an unexpected turn — to the current state of American politics. Below is an edited version of that exchange. To watch the complete half hour interview, go to Blue Smoke and Black Ink.

Greg Guma on Amazon

Jim DeFilippi: You;’ve written a book called Fake News: Journalism in the Age of Deceptions. How would it be if you were king of the world? How would you prefer journalism to be processed and distributed? I assume you think it’s mostly phony right now. What’s the solution to that? 

First of all, I wouldn’t want to be king. I don’t think we need a king — of the world or the country. But right now we have a very few people with control of very powerful social media vehicles. In a sense, we’ve been captured by people who control algorithms that determine what we see and have a strong influence, even stronger than television networks ever had in the old days, over how we think about issues. Unfortunately, truth is very difficult to find. And with AI it will become even more difficult. 

Concerning solutions, diversity is one of the strategies. It requires an educated public; media literacy, taught and encouraged from a very young age, which would encourage people to ask more questions, to be inquisitive and somewhat skeptical. That’s a skill people will need to exercise more and more.

If I was in charge of an organization that could influence public thought, I would encourage people to have diverse sources of information, to question authority, to decentralize power wherever you can. That’s where I may separate myself from some on the left, in this country and around the world, those who want to return to the past. Some say, “if only we could recapture the norms of the past in the United States.” But I think that, although having “United States” may have been a good idea at some point — although the jury is out on that — we no longer have one country. We have several different countries and cultures. The culture of the south and the west are as different from the culture of New England as they are from countries in Europe. 

But let’s look on the bright side. If we can encourage more autonomy, regional autonomy, the challenging of repressive or obsolete laws, and the encouragement of regional pacts between states and local communities, we can begin to create regional cultures. If the New England states formed their own pact and began to separate themselves from the decisions of the federal government wherever they can and formed, in a sense, a resistance alliance, we might be at the beginning of a decentralization process. That will not recreate the United States. In a way, the United States has probably ended. It’s been disunited, a process that was probably underway before Trump, but he’s accelerated it. He’s made the differences obvious. 

Now you have a strong minority of the country that disagrees with the direction that the other strong minority is going. We don’t have majoritarian control of the country. We have a minority movement of Christian nationalists, which has taken control of one of the political parties and, through it, the national government, and is attempting to force its vision on the rest of the country. And I think that this will continue to be resisted. The question is what is the effective resistance? I would say a gradual devolution and decentralization of power, and giving more power to states and regions to create their own future, is the beginning of a solution.

DeFilippi: That’s an amazing theory. You and I grew up in a world where people listened to Walter Cronkite or read the New York Times, or two or three other trustworthy networks or sources, and it’s all gone, isn’t it?

But that was a myth. I don’t know if you agree with me, but for example, Walter Cronkite used to say “That’s the way it is.” But often that wasn’t the way it was. He was a messenger of the political establishment of that time. The consensus was easier to manufacture, as Noam Chomsky would say. You had three networks, and their anchors all came up through the same journalistic community. There was much more consensus, at least among that particular elite. Now that has broken down and we have a proliferation of voices. The problem is no longer scarcity. It is figuring out what is true, what is relevant and accurate. The problem is overabundance. We’re being assaulted with information to the point where we have trouble deciding what to believe, and what not to believe. And the future is not going to make that any easier. 

The idea that we’re going to reach some future consensus, that there is going to be one America again, that we’ll all buy into the same vision again — I think that’s a fantasy. 

One of the problems is that with all the different sources of “news” you’d think people would be open to various political and social opinions. But they’re not. People on both sides of the cultural divide have become more hardened in their beliefs and refuse to listen to the other side. You need to free people who feel captives of an oppressive system. The left feels it is being forced to submit to a repressive regime. The right feels it’s been victimized and persecuted and is now seeking retribution and revenge. 

But if you free people from those beliefs — some of them myths, some true to a certain extent — if you allow people to feel they can express themselves, then they will be more open to other ideas. Now we have a dynamic where, if you admit the other side has any point at all, you are viewed by your side as a traitor. That produces more conformity. This is the process we’ve seen. Compromise has become a dirty word and the proposed solutions are often maximalist. We can’t just change the police, we got to defund it. Israel is not just wrong in what it has been doing in Gaza, it’s committing genocide. People are forced to take sides and become rigid, and not able to admit that other valid points of view are possible. 

We need to liberate people by allowing them to have more choices. But they’re not going to have choices if they feel they’re forced into a bifurcated system that doesn’t permit that. 

Europe would still be at war if the Germans had won World War II, still resisting under German values. Because you have the French and Germans and British and Italians, which have different values and priorities. Today they co-exist with the European community. Now, there is an American community. But do we have “united states?” No, the states are not united, and it’s getting worse rather than better. 

That’s why I say we need a gradual devolution of power to states and regions. The Supreme Court and some on the right agree with this, the idea that power should be local, and devolve to states when possible. 

In the 1970s, I worked with both conservatives and liberals in Vermont to create a group called the Decentralist League. It was led by John McClaughry, a conservative activist, and Bob O’Brien, who had just run for governor as a Democrat. The organization did not survive, in part derailed by Reagan’s election. But the idea was correct, I believe, that there were areas where the left and right could agree. We need to focus on such areas and prioritize them. Right now, saving health care is one of them. The Speaker has kept the House out of session for two main reasons. One is the Epstein files, but the other is to avoid the debate over the future of Obamacare subsidies. 

I think if we can prioritize that and a few other issues like the environment, the left and right could find some common ground. There will be obstacles. Right-wing libertarians prefer privatization, for example, and have problems with arguments for equality. And the left has its effort to apply forms of social engineering and needs to find its way back from that. But if you start a process of devolution, although you will still have those debates, you will be more able to find some common ground and a way forward.

As long as we have a dictatorial regime, the country is unlikely to become united again. But even if a Democrat became president, that would not fundamentally change. 

Blue Smoke and Black Ink: more on books and politics

11/25 Interview with Jim DeFilippi, part 2

Spirits of Desire, Dons of Time, Restless Spirits & Popular Movements

US design flaws, devolution, and meeting Bernie Sanders 

 

Above: Two books on Vermont and two previous novels;

Below: A non-fiction companion to Spirits of Desire

and an abbreviated look at Pacifica radio 

False Prophets of the Electronic Age

Unmoored, bombarded with disinformation, and spiritually starved, 

voters turn to electronic hucksters and demagogues who offer simplistic answers and the false hope of a moral revival. 

By Greg Guma

Glenn Beck and Fox News called the August 30, 2010 rally they staged in Washington, DC “non-political.” But that didn’t stop conservative politicians from saying the opposite, describing it as a reaction to Obama administration policies. And the rhetoric appealed mainly to those who already thought the US had been hijacked by godless socialists. 

The result was bizarre, although tame compared to the average Trump rally, and capitalized on the fact that it was held the same day, and in the same location, as Martin Luther King Jr’s historic “I have a dream” speech. Yet it flipped King’s vision on its head. A early example of political trolling.

None of this was really a surprise. Opportunists Beck and Sarah Palin — who had attracted a cult-like following of anti-government Tea Party activities and nativist “Mama Grizzlies” with her fact-challenged approach to politics — had seized the chance to distort public debate and promote themselves as electronic prophets. After all, they had a powerful pulpit on Fox News, whose parent company had just exposed its political preference with a $1 million contribution to the Republican Party. It was just the beginning.

Christian right evangelists had been doing this for generations. Starting with radio in the 1930s, they used each new technology to influence opinion, win elections, and hammer home their theology. One of the first was Aimee Semple McPherson, who pioneered the approach on a powerful Los Angeles radio station. Broadcasting from her temple, McPherson styled herself a modern-day Joan of Arc in a titanic struggle against communism.

McPherson’s crusade reached the boiling point in 1934 during the insurgent Democratic gubernatorial campaign of Upton Sinclair. The socialist author of The Jungle and other novels about the excesses of capitalism had pledged to “end poverty in California.” But the evangelist, in an alliance with Republican leaders, Hollywood propagandists and political consultants, recast the race in apocalyptic terms.

“Someone has cast in the poison herb,” McPherson bellowed on the Sunday before Election Day, “and if we eat thereof we shall all perish and the glory of our nation as it has stood through the years shall perish with us.” Sinclair, at first the front runner in an era of mass unemployment and hard times, became the target of the nation’s first disinformation-fueled “media campaign” and ultimately lost by 200,000 votes. McPherson effectively seized on growing fears of revolution, convincing her flock – many of them poor – that the real enemy was satanic communism and its Democratic messenger.  It sounds too familiar.

First appearing on CBS stations in 1930, Father Charles Coughlin built a similarly ardent following with his volatile mixture of populism, nationalism and anti-semitism. When CBS management insisted that he stop railing against “international bankers,” the evangelist appealed directly to his radio flock, who sent more than a million protest letters to the network. CBS responded by replacing all paid religious broadcasts with Church of the Air, a show that offered free, rotating air time to speakers from the three “major” faiths. This became a standard media approach with religious groups, a time slot for those with enough followers and clout.

Coughlin responded by creating his own network and becoming even more political, and ultimately fascist. Along the way, until losing much of his base in World War II, he suggested that “Christians suffer more at the hands of the Reds than Jews do in the Third Reich” and that Nazi Germany had to protect itself from Jewish communists who were influencing radio, journalism and finance. Attempts to censor him were often decried as “Jewish terrorism.”

Like Donald Trump, the Rev. Jerry Falwell and his Christian fundamentalist movement had an intense love/hate relationship with mass media. After all, the movement flourished on TV with Falwell’s “Old Time Gospel Hour.” By 1980, a tabloid newspaper turned Falwell’s radio and TV pronouncements into syndicated columns. The paper’s reporters gloated about its growing influence. At the same time, however, they despised the “immoral” television networks. It took a while to get one of their own.

For these pioneers of electronic fundamentalism, the real “insiders” were purveyors of “smut” and degenerate lifestyles, a vast group that included most “non-Christian” media and members of the press. Their basic message, which read like a newsy catechism, was that the “moral” can clean up the media by exerting control over it. That meant boycotting specific outlets, while supporting and exclusively consuming Christian media.

Through insistent propaganda, the Moral Majority turned ignorance into strength and sexism into a virtue. This sounds all too contemporary in the post-truth era of bully boy politics.

Still, the electronic fundamentalism of Falwell’s empire was almost moderate in contrast with the outright Aryan arrogance of Christian Vanguard. “Specifically compiled for the Elect,” this religious house organ was obsessed with one big enemy, the Jews. It was a more bullish racism, punctuated with articles like “Sadistic Jewish Slaughter of Animals.”

Pretending to intellectual rigor, one article attempted to prove that the enemy was plagued by a “devastating sense of inferiority.” In another report, covering an Aryan Nations Movement conference, the publisher of a sister publication, Zion’s Watchman, came out strong against humanism, marxism and “the seed of the serpent.”

Yet the Aryans remained hopeful, according to another contributor, because “the various right wing movements will come together, and unite as never before once we understand the importance of rallying under the Law of God, making what we call Germany’s WWII ‘Nazism’ seem tiny in comparison.” It was scary stuff, yet crept into public discourse.

Like many movement house organs of the pre-Internet 1980s, Christian Vanguard had a mail order clearinghouse for books, with listings under headings like “secret societies,” “the money question,” and “the Jewish world conspiracy.” Another heading covered “self defense and survival,” and included books on explosives, combat and surveillance. This was an early warning of the armed and dangerous nativism and survivalism to come. 

Clearly, the “Elect” were prepping for a future war. Reading their paper also offered solid proof that Nazism was alive in Louisiana and other places in the ’80s. In 2017 it ultimately re-emerged publicly and violently in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Not much has changed since the radio years except the targets. Speaking on his own TV network, Pat Robertson made the goal absolutely clear years ago:  “to mobilize Christians, one precinct at a time, one community at a time, one state at a time, until once again we are the head and not the tail, and at the top rather than at the bottom of our political system.” In a country founded on the principle of church-state separation, this sounded unlikely — for a while. Yet Beck, Palin and millions of others embraced this “dream.”

To call Beck and Palin evangelists, or even propagandists, isn’t a stretch.  Promoted by Fox and backed by corporate conservatives like the Koch family, they and others normalized an extreme, religiously-infused ideology and immersed viewers in a false reality. Specious arguments were presented as history, biblical truth or scientific fact. At first these “electronic “prophets” disguised their political calls as sermons or attempts to “restore” integrity and honor. Too often “mainstream” media legitimized and mainstreamed their messages. Now the mask is off.

Working with idealogues and opportunists, the religious right created a distorted picture of contemporary reality that millions of people, insecure and hungry for guidance, came to embrace. As former Christian Coalition director Ralph Reed explained before the election of George W. Bush, the short-term objective was to force candidates to endorse their religious right’s agenda, an effort that frequently proved successful. But the ultimate step was to turn the agenda into national policy, a goal that first came into view when candidates for president in 2000, most notably Bush, inserted religious right rhetoric into the presidential election.

A foundation had been laid during the previous decade. Although their candidates faltered in the 1990s, Christian Right “wedge” issues – school prayer, family values, sex, abortion, and gay “lifestyle” – skewed the debate, eclipsing the competing views of progressive Christians and others who opposed an intolerant and paranoid theology.

“Our time is coming,” Pat Buchanan told the faithful during the 1996 presidential primaries. Having lost every race on Super Tuesday, he nevertheless predicted victory for the fundamentalist forces he helped catalyze. Buchanan’s gospel of “cultural war” struck a chord with the Christian right and Howard Phillips US Taxpayers Party, which wanted to restore the “Christian republic,” end welfare, scrap the civil service and IRS, and withdraw from international organizations. 

In 2000, candidates like Steve Forbes, Allen Keyes, and Gary Bauer built on this foundation, linking jeremiads about political corruption and moral decay with calls to overthrow Roe v. Wade. Once Palin emerged during the 2008 presidential campaign Buchanan looked positively gleeful on TV as his gospel was embraced by a new generation.

In response, progressives put their faith in exposure. When more people understood the extreme views of the Christian Right, went the logic, their candidates would be rejected. But too many people, uncertain about their futures and the safety of their families and friends, were already vulnerable to the politics of paranoia and blame. 

From time to time, Beck and others would also point to a secret conspiracy supposedly bent on subjugating the nation to some form of mutated socialism or fascism.  The idea that Barack Obama was a Muslim Manchurian Candidate fit well within this theory. It echoed the sermons of McPherson and Father Coughlin. In a time of distrust and decadence, when more and more believe their institutions don’t work and leaders are usually greedy crooks, it isn’t hard to accept such a prophecy. Then came birther-ism and Donald Trump.

Unmoored, bombarded with disinformation, and spiritually starved, too many people have turned to electronic hucksters who offered simplistic answers and the hope of a moral revival. Although some spiritual traditions offered more constructive answers – tolerance, equality, harmony with nature, and social justice, among others – their spokesmen don’t often reach so vast an audience.

But endlessly repeating lies and distortions, while sometimes effective for a while, doesn’t make them true. Even a manipulated public must eventually face the contradiction of a movement that poses as patriotic and “pro-family” and the divisions and destruction it promotes. There is still hope that the hypocritical moralizing of opportunists — from Beck and Palin to Trump — will be exposed for what it is, a false prophecy that no amount of repetition can conceal.

Bringing War Back Home: Vietnam & Siege Mentality

EXCERPTS FROM MANAGING CHAOS

REVIEW: WHO WILL TELL US THE NEWS?

Norman Stockwell, The Progressive

BY GREG GUMA

Around the time I turned 21, Sen. J. William Fulbright described what was taking place across the country as a “spiritual rebellion” of the young against a betrayal of national values. Almost half the US population was under 25 at the time. I’m not sure how spiritual they were, but, speaking personally, I did feel betrayed, conflicted and rebellious. 

It was March, 1968, and the US Senate had opened an investigation on the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, passed four years earlier. The resolution had given President Johnson a blank check to wage war in Vietnam, based on a trumped-up military incident. Half a million troops were mobilized as American leaders used communist fears and falling dominoes to rationalize a major invasion. 

The operative logic was that it might be necessary to destroy the country in order to save it.

Anti-war protest at the Bennington Monument (GGuma/1969)

For a moment the storm clouds parted. Eugene McCarthy, an ardent opponent of the war, won an encouraging 42 percent of the Democratic Presidential primary vote in New Hampshire. Four days later, Robert Kennedy officially entered the race. By the end of the month Johnson announced that he wouldn’t seek re-election. It felt like history was speeding up and moving forward. But on the same day Kennedy announced his run, American troops lined up hundreds of old men, women and children in a South Vietnamese village, Mai Lai, and killed them. It was one of several massacres that were hidden for two years. 

Just as the country looked for a way out, it was losing its soul.

In the midst of this chaos the prescient muckraker I.F. Stone wrote something in his weekly newsletter that stuck with me. “Everywhere we talk liberty and social reform,” he warned, “but we end up by allying ourselves with native oligarchies and military cliques — just as we have done in Vietnam. In the showdown, we reach for the gun.”

As if hammering that home, a few weeks later, two months before I graduated from Syracuse University, a shot rang out in Memphis and ended the life of Martin Luther King Jr. A political assasination, five years after the death of President Kennedy, this one was possibly linked to a racist (and perhaps FBI) conspiracy. In the days that followed, riots erupted in at least 125 American cities, resulting in more than 20,000 arrests and the mobilization of federal troops and the National Guard. Like millions of others, I was stunned, confused, angry, and scared. Two months later, just after I moved to Vermont, Robert Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles on the night he won the California primary.

The war had come home with brutal violence and death. In the first five months of the year, almost 10,000 soldiers died in Vietnam, more than in all of 1967. By July, there had been over 200 major demonstrations on campuses across the country. Yet despite the obvious signs of domestic unrest, especially about the war, it continued to escalate. And the domestic repression was just beginning.

After my last classes and a few goodbyes, I didn’t even hang around for the graduation ceremonies. Instead, I packed a suitcase, stored my Yamaha bike, and drove to Bennington. Nestled between Albany and Western Mass in southern Vermont, it felt like an escape from the urban rat race, high-energy aggression and ruthless competition, mass anxiety and gnawing fear. 

Out there, but not too far… 

a media saga, personal story and cautionary tale 

MAVERICK BOOKS, 317 pages, illustrated

Now Available in Paperback: Order Here  

For review copies, send name, address and $8 to MavMediaVT@gmail.com

View sample on Amazon 

Managing Chaos: Adventures in Alternative Media — an eye-witness account that explores the unique, tumultuous history of Pacifica radio and alternative media in America. Filled with episodes from an eclectic career, Greg Guma’s new book discusses the evolution of radio and television, the impacts of concentrated media ownership, the rise of the alternative press, his complex relationship with Bernie Sanders, his work in Vermont before and during a progressive revolution that changed the state’s power structure, and decades later, what happened while he managed the original listener-supported radio network. Here is another excerpt.

Siege Mentality

In-person meetings of Pacifica’s national board were all-weekend affairs. Really more than a weekend: Managers and staff began arriving Wednesday for a full-day, staff-only summit on Thursday. Held every three months, these quarterly rituals took considerable energy and preparation time.

The location rotated according to a mandated sequence, another bylaw restriction created by the reformers who recaptured the network, evidently designed to equalize local participation. The trouble was that housing dozens of people for days in a venue like New York, plus a meeting space large enough to accommodate an audience and “public comments” from activists, could cost double the price of the same digs in Houston. But a summer session in Texas could be unbearable. It was arbitrary, uncomfortable, and sometimes unnecessarily costly.

On the other hand, the gatherings brought together people from disparate communities and cultures across the country. If the vibe was right, an in-person PNB meeting could build momentum behind new ideas. My plan for the March 2006 session in Los Angeles, two months after I started work, was to lay out problems and win early “buy in” for a network-oriented response. Not to reach consensus. It was more like critical mass.

As Affiliates Program Coordinator Ursula Ruedenberg delicately put it during a “thematic” discussion that weekend, national programming “is very thorny just beneath the surface. It set the stage for what happened in the ‘90s. There began to be pressure to work as a national network,” she recalled, “and that process aroused all sorts of issues.”

The timing and location looked right. The board was about to adopt a National Programming Policy, which would trigger the hiring of a coordinator. Theoretically, he or she could pull together people and programs across the country. Meanwhile, outside the hotel in the streets of Los Angeles, over a half a million people were gathering for “La Gran Marcha,” part of a nationwide protest against a proposed law to raise penalties for illegal immigration and classify the undocumented — or anyone who helped them — as felons. 

Over the next few days hundreds of thousands also showed up for rallies in places like Denver, Cleveland, Columbus, Detroit, and Nashville. In the wider debate over immigration these protests not only demonstrated opposition to the bill, they called for a “path to legalization” for the millions of people entering the country without documents or permission.

Living in Los Angeles more than a decade earlier, I’d watched immigration politics play a role during the riots of 1992. Border Patrol cops deployed in Latino communities arrested more than 1,000 people. Afterward, the INS began work with the Pentagon’s Center for Low-Intensity Conflict and the line between civilian and military operations was largely erased. Human Rights Watch accused border cops of routine abuse, a pattern of beatings, shootings, rapes, and deaths. In June 1995, detainees in a private jail had rioted after being tortured by guards.

In some ways, Southern California embodied both the American Dream and the right’s cultural nightmare. A confluence of climate, capital and demographics had made it an international zone and the world’s image capital. By the early 21st century, the City of Angels was populated heavily by brown and black residents, many of them recent immigrants. It would soon be more than 40 percent Hispanic, 12 percent Asian, 10 percent Black, and less than 40 percent European-American. As David Rieff noted in his book, Los Angeles: Capital of the Third World, the rest of the country, and possibly the world, would likely follow the L.A. model.

Moving to New Mexico in 1996, I ran a non-profit that provided legal support for both legal and undocumented immigrants. By then the border had become a battlefield. Government strategies for combating undocumented immigration had remilitarized the entire region. The recently-passed North American Free Trade Agreement meshed neatly with more obvious aspects of low-intensity conflict doctrine. The definition of immigration and drug trafficking as “national security” issues brought military thought and tactics into domestic affairs. Just as the projection of a “communist menace” had been a smokescreen for post-war expansionism, a “Brown wave,” the “Drug War” and terrorism were used as pretexts for military-industrial penetration.

Immersing myself in immigration law and regional race politics, I developed a coalition of sympathetic groups to fight back against the most draconian aspects of a new immigration reform law. We staged public rallies in Albuquerque, and brought Latino and Asian spokesmen to Santa Fe to testify at legislative hearings. 

Defending the rights of immigrants was a perfect focus for Pacifica, and the national board promptly took time out to join the march. For KPFK it was a golden programming opportunity. The station went live for five hours that day, airing reports and coverage in Spanish and English, the first show of its kind. Yet the other sister stations didn’t take it as a national feed, preferring local coverage or the usual shows.

Latino programming was at the top of the agenda. Largely at the urging of KPFK, the board had decided that a daily Spanish language news show should be launched nationally. New York and DC Latino activists were lobbying for more airtime. They had a practical point. The demographic trends in signal areas and nationally pointed to a large “under-served” audience. According to Arbitron, Latinos spent more time listening to the radio than any other ethnic group. 

In fact, Spanish-language media — Univision, Telemundo and radio stations — had helped to mobilize people for the immigration protests. In L.A. , Eddie “Piolin” Sotelo, a Spanish radio personality, persuaded friends at other stations to rally listeners and cover the event. But commercial radio’s interest in the issue was likely to fade, while Pacifica, if it made a sustained commitment, could build a large and loyal new listenership.

“I’m feeling a lot of pressure for change,” I told the board, “people waiting to see whether I will take sides, and waiting to judge. I’m bound to disappoint some people. There’s really no way to satisfy all of the expectations.” It might be possible to find common ground, I allowed, but winner-take-all wasn’t the best starting point. 

“What we have, with certain exceptions, is a siege mentality,” I reminded them, “sometimes referred to as protecting turf.”…

From the Epilogue

Pacifica had been through a decade of internal struggle when I arrived in Berkeley. Worried about a possible corporate takeover, members of the staff, board and volunteers at the stations had fought back, and eventually created a new, more democratic governance structure. You might even call it hyper-democratic. But also incomplete, unwieldy and difficult to amend. It didn’t prevent factions from forming at various stations. In fact, it seemed to produce contested board elections and bitter charges that the process was unfair, even rigged. 

In January 2006 the organization was battle-weary, but recovering and financially stable. The next two years were more peaceful than most. But the animosity and tribalism didn’t vanish. Rather than become the center of yet another internal power struggle, I stepped aside to make way for the next chief executive, someone who had been fired years before. 

As it turns out, she didn’t appreciate the new democratic structure and stayed for less than a year. Six years after that, one of her successors barricaded herself inside the national office rather than accept a replacement. The mood had gone from suspicious to openly hostile.

Personally, it was a productive decade. Despite the warning before becoming ED, I did work again. Once back in Vermont, I returned to writing and journalism, and wrote about Burlington and national politics for VTDigger.com, a new online platform that established itself as a leading news source. Gannett still owned the Burlington Free Press, but it was no longer a Vermont media leader and not much of a daily. Now a top news source was Seven Days, a robust print weekly that succeeded the Vanguard Press and provided breaking news through an effective online platform. 

After the Democrats resumed control of City Hall, I also ran for mayor, something I had postponed for decades, ever since stepping aside for Bernie. 

Chapter One: Excerpt

Other Excerpts: The Road to Change

Media Maverick: About the Author