· We don’t critique existing models, nor seek related exemplars, we imagine a new one.

· We collaborate; we don’t compete.

· The “common good” is a mean, not an absolute, meaning the best possible for the most, not perfect for all. The perfect is the enemy of the good.

What is a criminal justice system?

The goal of an ideal criminal justice system is to create a society and economy in which citizens have no motivation to offend… a society in which the needs of families and children are largely met: the intergenerational chain of trauma and abuse is diminished through trauma-informed counseling; public education focuses on classroom success as a joint venture rather than “specialized learning plans”(SLPs) for each student; diverse housing options, including co-housing, are affordable and accessible; food systems support both growers and consumers; the economy supports employees and employees in a synergistic relationship; and government evens out economic inequalities through taxation and regulation… a society in which most, even if not all, citizens can thrive.

Criminal justice is more than incarceration. It includes: law enforcement agencies, legislators, judges, juries, and ordinary citizens. It’s all of us.

Let’s envision an ideal criminal justice system using healthcare as a metaphor. Primary-care focuses on maintaining a healthy population as opposed to the profitable business of fixing sick people. Americans spend $4.5T on healthcare, but only 4% is spent on maintaining population health through primary care.

Meanwhile, we spend some $417B annually incarcerating some two million offenders, the largest incarcerated population of any developed democratic country in the world.

Again “the common good” is not about everyone being their best but about the best possible for the most. Some will inevitably fall through the cracks.

As such, an ideal criminal justice system, as in healthcare, starts with triage.

Is the genesis of the offense, the result of residual poverty, mental illness, or addiction?

If so, resolve the cause, and then treat the offender.

· If poverty’s the cause, ensure that their basic human needs are met.

· If addiction’s the cause, provide treatment and recovery options.

· If mental illness is the cause, treat the illness.

Science is learning that “mental illness” is, to a large degree, a fabrication of the pharmaceutical industry to market drugs, and that what we call “mental illness” is, in fact, a metabolic disorder that can present in a panoply of symptoms: anxiety, depression, ADHD, alcoholism, eating disorders, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia. Effective recovery may be as simple as a significant change in diet, an exercise regime, and sleep, all of which enhance mitochondrial wellbeing and diminish symptoms.

Remember, a goal is just that. No matter how hard we try, there will be residual imperfection. The perfect does not exist.

In the rare case where simple evil intent is the driver, the offender is confined to protect the public in a humane and secure housing unit. Treatment includes community restorative-justice participation, exercise programs, prison journalism, vocational and wilderness training, and spiritual programs like meditation and yoga.

And finally, our criminal justice system excludes the profit motive, avoids a focus on “punishment” or “atonement,” and is guided by the goal of safely returning an offender to his or her family and community as soon as possible.

The “common good” makes all of us better even as it belies perfection.

--Bill Schubart

In January of last year, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis began signing death warrants at a furious pace, leading to the most intense period of executions the state has carried out in the last 80 years.

Seven days before Christmas, Frank Wells was executed over the course of several minutes with infused chemicals… the 19^th man poisoned by Florida in 2025, breaking its previous record of 11 executions in 1936 and accounting for 40% of all U.S. executions in 2025.

So, Florida… how about putting “Death Penalty State” on your license plates instead of “Sunshine State”?

Thirty-three states have either abandoned the death penalty or simply stopped seeking it in sentencing hearings. Since the effective deployment of DNA analysis in the mid ‘80s, there’ve been over 200 exonerations, justifying fears that innocent people may be executed in error. There’s no way to know how many of the 1,673 peo­ple exe­cut­ed since 1976 may also have been inno­cent. A review of more than 20 past executions has shown strong forensic indicators of innocence and therefore wrongful execution. Meanwhile, decades of declining criminal violence have reduced the public’s call for revenge, and support for the death penalty has dropped to about half the population.

But I’m confused. Our current crop of ruling politicians insists that America is a nation of White, Christian heritage but are willing to ignore their own God’s fifth commandment, which is, “Thou Shalt Not Kill.” Do they consider it simply irrelevant in the modern age, a moral inconvenience?

There’s long a long tradition of philosophical contradiction when it comes to rationalizing criminal justice. There are those who hail the Old Testament’s principle of atonement… the idea that, along with repenting, one must undergo some form of punishment.

Was it simply the many Hail Mary penances I recited as a former Catholic after having confessed to “self-abuse” ten times in the two weeks, or whether a convicted felon gets a lengthy prison sentence or is executed to satisfy the public’s need for revenge?

Is atonement a way forward or a way backward?

Sadly, the Old Testament resonates in those calling for elected officials to be “tough on crime,” and choosing to ignore the ethical contradiction in killing to punish.

But as human kind has evolved, another philosophical basis for criminal justice has emerged… exemplified by reform efforts in other countries.

Norway is an exemplar for criminal justice reform around the world. One reason… its recidivism rate -- people returned to prison for a second offense – is a low 20%. Meanwhile, the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), the federal government’s primary source for recidivism data, has documented that 82% of state prisoners are re-arrested at some point in the 10 years following their release, 71% are rearrested within 5 years, and 44% return before their first year out of prison is completed. Also of interest, for males who’ve reached 36 to 42 years of age, the purported phenomenon of male menopause takes effect and their recidivism rate drops to below five percent.

So, in sum, which philosophy makes more sense… harsher punishments or institutional recovery programs offering rehabilitation and safe reentry? Which is more cost-efficient or, more importantly, more humane?

The Vermont Department of Corrections (DOC), with a staff of 1,124 has a 2026 budget request for $230,877,018 for a total population of some 1,400 incarcerees, of which 882 are convicted and sentenced and 551 are simply detainees in jail awaiting trial. Responsible lawmakers and citizens must ask themselves if this money could be used more effectively to lower costs and reduce recidivism?

Before he departed to assume leadership of New York City’s Rikers Island with its 7,000 incarcerees, I asked our then Corrections Commissioner, Nick Deml, how many of the 160 women under his department’s direct control did the public need protection from. His immediate answer was twelve… women who had a history of violence or psychotic behavior. The rest were in his care for either crimes associated with mental illness, addiction, or poverty. How much would $230,000,000 do to alleviate these three sources of criminal behavior?

Meanwhile, former Burlington Police Chief John Murad, recently appointed to replace departing Commissioner Deml, announced that under his leadership -- and purportedly at the request of Governor Scott -- he is reviving a policy called “risk containment” established in 2024 This enables the Department to retain an incarcerated person past their minimum release date to “protect the public.” As such, risk containment intrinsically denies furlough, the most common practice for a prisoner returning to society.

On separate note, the sheer number of detainees charged, but not yet tried, raises a Constitutional question.

I’ve known and met with Commissioners of Corrections going back to Con Hogan’s tenure in 1977. They’ve all said the same to me when discussing their priorities:

We’re only the innkeepers. We don’t put people in jail. Judges, police and legislators do. We’re only responsible for their safety and the public’s safety while they’re under our care. If you want to reduce our population, talk to those who either create laws that put people in jail or those who arraign them.

The Vermont Judiciary, which encompasses the state’s entire court system, handles some 81,000 new cases every year. It is facing significant judgeship shortages, leading to judicial reassignments to cover cases in other areas preventing judges from presiding over their own caseloads.

As of January16 this year, there were over 35,500 pending cases statewide, according to data from the Vermont Judiciary, of which some 42%, or 15,294 of those pending cases are criminal cases, twice the number of pending criminal cases before the pandemic. This means hundreds of people languish in the state’s correctional facilities without yet being convicted of a crime. Others have been released on cash bail or on their own recognizance.

The Sixth Amendment guarantees the right to a fair trial “without delay.”

“In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence (sic).

So, if Vermont has some 550 inmates incarcerated as detainees awaiting their Constitutional right to a “speedy trial of their peers,” is Vermont not in serious violation of the Constitution? Vermont’s prevailing Constitution has the same guarantee in its Article 12.

“That when any issue in fact, proper for the cognizance of a jury is joined in a court of law, the parties have a right to trial by jury, which ought to be held sacred.”

n Bill Schubart

Vermonters have a primary vote coming on August 11th and a midterm election on November 3^rd. Our most immediate concern is gubernatorial. Who will lead Vermont for the next two years?

There are three candidates, two women and the male incumbent, who is running again. He served three terms as lieutenant governor from 2011-2017 under then Governor Shumlin. He has served as governor since 2016, winning five additional terms. He is running for an unprecedented sixth term. Confidants have suggested he was ready to retire from leadership and resume his passion for stock-car racing and running his construction company but purportedly is running again at the urging of his party.

Over my 79 years in Vermont, I’ve had many friends in the political landscape… legislators, governors, and agency heads. I’ve agreed with some, disagreed with others, advised some, written negatively about others but, in the Vermont tradition, have tried to do so in a civil manner, decrying the behavior not the individual.

I’ve thought extensively about the current contenders, have spoken with them personally from time to time and have my own thoughts about their potential for leadership.

Frankly, I agree with our current Governor, his time is up. I give him full credit for his leadership during the pandemic, and, to a slightly lesser degree, during the flooding. He showed skill as a crisis manager. But as to the accelerating pain-points affecting Vermonters -- healthcare access and cost; public education funding; affordable housing; providing shelter and hunger to those in need; reforming criminal justice; regulating environmental degradation; and taxation and regulation that supports the common good -- our current governor hasn’t shown Vermonters a clear strategic path to address these issues, choosing instead to take a compromise position between the business interests propelled by lobbyists and the good of the commons.

Another candidate, who grew up in Newbury, has a significant political history and is using it effectively to propel her ultimate goal of leadership.

Working with the current Governor, she went on a listening tour to learn what Vermonters cared most about. She rightfully heard that affordability and access to livable-wage jobs were key issues and came to feel that affordable child care was an underlying cause of many of these concerns.

Rallying philanthropic, legislative, and public interests, she effectively led a statewide child-care initiative as affordability became more elusive and both family partners had to enter the workforce. She learned the system and worked it effectively. Her one liability may be whether the Vermont budget --suffering its own “affordability crisis” -- can sustain her successful initiative. I wrote about this in 2023, suggesting that another incremental fix will only add cost and complexity to a challenge that requires a strategic fix rather than an incremental one. I have respect for this candidate and her goal of statewide leadership.

Another candidate, new to many Vermonters, is running at a different altitude of leadership… strategic. She grew up in South Strafford, Vermont, and spent her first professional decade doing work internationally in leadership roles working directly with governments, international development institutions, and global networks to design and implement economic policy. As Economics and Policy Lead for the global Wellbeing Economy Alliance (WEAll), she helped lead an international organization connecting hundreds of partner organizations, policymakers, academics, and civic leaders across more than 60 countries, overseeing the development of policy frameworks, advising government leaders, managing complex multi-stakeholder initiatives, and coordinating international efforts to advance economic reforms focused on long-term prosperity and community wellbeing. She also led the creation of WEAll’s Wellbeing Economy Policy Design Guide, a framework used by governments and communities to redesign public policy around measurable outcomes such as health, housing, environmental sustainability, and economic security. Her hands-on experience includes directing wellbeing-economy pilot projects with local governments in California, Canada, New Zealand, and Scotland, bringing together public officials, community organizations, and residents to develop and execute new policy approaches. Before that, she worked as an industrial policy and structural transformation expert with the United Nations and the African Development Bank, advising governments on economic development strategies, job creation, and long-term economic planning, navigating complex bureaucracies, managing relationships among public and private stakeholders, and translating ambitious goals into practical policy.

In Vermont in 2024, she co-founded the Wellbeing Economy Alliance of Vermont, helping build and lead a statewide coalition dedicated to creating a more resilient and inclusive economy. She also served on the ACLU-VT Board’s steering committee, Fund Vermont’s Future.

For us all to vote effectively for leadership in the upcoming elections, we must listen carefully to all the candidates, assess their ideas and qualifications for leadership and vote in both elections, regardless of White House efforts to sow doubts about our elections. Elections ensure our constitutional right to have a say in who will lead us and how, and where.

We must also ask, do we treat the symptom or do we address the underlying causes of our problems? Is your choice of candidate experienced in designing strategic solutions and making them a reality? Do they understand process, procedure and power structure or simply have a desire to lead? Do they talk with and listen to us, then distill and deploy effective strategies to address and alleviate our pain-points?

We must all decide who will best listen to us, focus on the common good and put forth and execute strategic solutions that don’t mire the landscape with incremental “fixes.”

Please engage with the three candidates, ask tough questions and vote. And urge young people to do so as well.

Bill Schubart

As a devotee of French history, language and literature, I used to celebrate Bastille Day every year at my former home in Lincoln, Vermont. One year when we had some 50 or 60 neighbors over for salmon and beef. I noticed no one was swimming in our pond. The temperature that day set the record for a summer low at 38 degrees. Yesterday at our home in Hinesburg, it was 93 — 55 degrees warmer.

The other memory that comes up is when I saw in 1966 the first Broadway Production of Peter Weiss’s landmark musical entitled The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade (Marat/Sade). After reading about it, I was dying to see it, but then read that the whole run had sold out almost immediately. The Marquis de Sade had himself spent five and a half years in the Bastille.

A few days later a filmmaker friend called me up and asked if I wanted to join him to see Marat/Sade? I said I’d love to but informed him it was sold out. “I’ve got two tickets he responded, orchestra seats, it’s in three days.”

Stunned, I asked him how he had managed to get them. He reminded me that he worked part-time in the mailroom at CBS. He saw an envelope from the Martin Beck Theater addressed to Fred Friendly, then president of CBS News. He steamed open the envelope, removed two of the six tickets, resealed it, and put in Mr. Friendly’s mail slot.

When we met at the Beck, I expected we’d be arrested but we saw the whole production. To this date perhaps the most powerful piece of theater I’ve ever seen.

Its relevance is not lost on me today. Give a quick listen to Judy Collins singing from Marat/Sade.

• Bill Schubart

We’re only beginning to understand the genesis and impact of addictions. We’ve known since the opium wars in the early 1800s that opiates, stimulants, alcohol, tobacco, and certain foods we introduce into our bodies can be addictive. But science has taught us that we can also become addicted to chemicals the body itself produces in response to certain behaviors like sexual activity, gambling, shopping, experiencing extreme risk, and the like.

The relatively new science of epigenetics explores the impact of emotional stimulus and trauma on human physiology and its durable impact on successive generations. We’re learning that trauma alters our physiology in negative ways and that those changes can be passed from generation to generation as studies of Holocaust survivors have shown.

In this age of extreme wealth accumulation, a shrinking middle class, and a bloom of poverty, could the obsessive accretion of wealth be yet another form of addiction and, if so, what are the epigenetic, neurological, physiological, and behavioral impacts on those so addicted? We know that mundane financial decisions can trigger the infusion of dopamine, cortisol, serotonin, and other neurostimulants, influencing our daily behaviors. We have learned that obsessive shopping is an addictive behavior.

Human psychology retains today its primal drive for survival and security. We still exhibit the “fight or flight” response even in a more secure existence. In the hunter-gatherer epoch, humankind hunted what they needed to survive in real-time. But some 12,000 years ago, as the Neolithic period emerged and agriculture became common, the challenge went from survival to storage and preservation to retain excess crops for winter survival. So then, at what point in history did the psychological need to amass more than one needed for one’s self and one’s family take over?

Wealth is not a “zero-sum game.” Wealth is created by productivity. Universal wealth can expand with exploration and discovery. But lack of taxation and regulatory oversight in areas like rent-seeking, labor exploitation, and monopoly creation can make wealth seem like a zero-sum game.

Colonial wealth came at the expense of colonized nations. Economist Utsa Patnaik estimates that Britain drained approximately $45 trillion from India between 1765 and 1938. Feudal systems and slavery operated on the principle that the wealth of the ruling class derived from the labor of the owned and oppressed.

These historical systems demonstrate that wealth can indeed be zero-sum when institutional arrangements permit extraction without value creation—a lesson deeply relevant today when evaluating modern economic structures.

Between 1990 and 2019 the wealth held by the world’s billionaires doubled and the share of U.S. wealth owned by the top 0.1 percent grew 59.6 percent from 1989 to 2024, according to an Institute for Policy Studies analysis of Federal Reserve data, while the share of U.S. wealth owned by the bottom 50 percent of households has declined 26.1 percent, adjusted for inflation.

This bottom half of households in America — 66 million of them — had $4.1 trillion at the end of 2024. The 905 billionaires in the United States hold a combined $7.8 trillion in wealth, according to Forbes data from September 29, 2025, giving them political influence and power that undermines our democracy.

As such, should we treat the obsessive accretion of wealth as a psychological dysfunction or a governmental one?

Cutting-edge neuroscience tells us that the accumulation of wealth may have less to do with income growth, market decisions, or frugality than with our neurological responses. Getting rich often triggers a neurological process shaped by how our brains process risk, reward, fear, and focus. Financial decisions, like the other behaviors mentioned above, can also trigger a flood of dopamine, cortisol, and serotonin, the response to which can be addictive.

History has long taught us that a financially robust working class is the foundation of a stable society, as we learned after World War II during the Eisenhower era. We also know that wealth is not in and of itself a negative but extremes of poverty and wealth are.

So, we have options. The three co-equal branches of government can lead by working together to regulate and tax appropriately (yes…redistributing wealth!) our economic endeavor with an eye to the common good.

And we can also deepen our understanding of the neuropsychology behind obsessive wealth creation that creates fortunes beyond the needs of a secure and comfortable existence.

What psychological dysfunction drives the obsession to move from a multimillionaire to a billionaire and recently to a trillionaire?

Let’s better understand this psychological dysfunction for the good of our country.

The psychology of wealth, empathy, and entitlement

https://www.apa.org/news/podcasts/speaking-of-psychology/wealth-empathy

New Psychological Studies: How the Rich Really Are Different From Everyone Else

https://www.forbes.com/sites/rainerzitelmann/2019/05/08/new-psychological-studies-how-the-wealthy-really-are-different-from-everyone-else/

How Money Changes the Way You Think and Feel

https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_money_changes_the_way_you_think_and_feel

The Money-Empathy Gap

https://nymag.com/news/features/money-brain-2012-7/

Piff, P.K., et al. Higher social class predicts unethical behavior. PNAS, 27 Feb 2012.

https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1118373109

The psychology of materialism

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/psychology-materialism_n_4425982

- Bill Schubart

In 2023, then-Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory on how critical social connection is to wellbeing and, in fact, survival. The advisory includes current research analysis on how mortality, cardiovascular disease, hypertension, diabetes, infectious diseases, cognitive decline, depression and anxiety, suicidality and self-harm can all be caused or exacerbated by loneliness. The advisory is a critical and innovative bridge between social conditions and physiological decline in aging.

Recently, I’ve been hearing the term “elder-orphan” and also “geographic orphans.”

Reasons for this include steep declines in marriage and fertility and increased cohabitation. Scientists disagree on recent reports about declines in sperm counts among men here and abroad, even as births are declining significantly. Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows America’s total fertility rate has plummeted to a historic low of 1.6 children per woman—well below the 2.1 replacement level needed to maintain an age-diverse population without immigration. And, of course, this has an impact on the long-term viability of government programs such as Social Security and Medicare.

Anecdotally, when I was a teen growing up in Morrisville, VT, we were focused on how to prevent our girlfriends from getting pregnant. We all knew as kids, that when a girl disappeared from school and community, where she’d gone and, worse, what had happened to her, even if we did acknowledge our own responsibility. Today, I have so many young friends, married and unmarried, trying various fertility treatments like IVF, to have children.

A relevant demographic shift has to do with families and communities. When I was young, living in Morrisville, VT, new generations rarely imagined leaving their natal communities. Friends married friends and sought work in their communities where possible. Even today, I have a dozen family members still living in Morrisville, and we gather several times a year. My own biological children all live within 20 minutes of my home. I’m lucky, but also an exception.

Rapid technological change and business consolidations have moved career opportunities out of smaller communities. I remember when IBM first moved to Essex Junction and offered something like $1.35 an hour for new employees and my friends’ fathers who were hill-farmers put their farms up for sale to the highest bidder, bought cars, and began commuting to Essex daily.

This outward migration only continues today. The vibrant town that Morrisville was in my youth is now much quieter and many of the local businesses are no longer there. Young people may move away to go to college or to find employment consistent with their goals or just to “see the world.” This is, in and of itself, healthy. As boundaries dissolve into political chaos and cultures collide, the more our children can become citizens of the world the better, in my view. I have often advocated for both compulsory national service (not necessarily military, perhaps inner-city work or the Peace Corps), and for a high-school graduation prerequisite that every student must spend a semester studying in a foreign country before being awarded a degree.

The point being that families now disperse nationally and even internationally such that family elders are often left alone in their communities. Hence the term “geographic orphans.”

Childless older adults have fewer sources of potential support within their households. Some four in ten childless older adults live alone, compared to two in ten parents. Childless adults are also less likely to have gotten married and, therefore, more likely to be living alone. Only about 40% of childless adults are living with a spouse, compared to 63% of those who are parents. And only five percent of childless adults cohabit, whereas 13% of older parents or older childless adults live with another type of relative such as an aunt/uncle, cousin, nephew, or parent.

How do we address this? Has social media helped? Somewhat. But a Zoom call or “WhatsApp” meeting isn’t the same as a family coming together to celebrate or mourn a major life event, perhaps over a shared meal.

We must build into our healthcare-reform infrastructure - especially community-based primary-care solutions and community organizations - ways to address the growing problem of “elder-orphans.” We might begin with such things as regularly scheduled home visits by primary-care staff, neighbors, volunteers, delivery people… just someone to knock on the door and ask “How ya doin’?”

In a rapidly-aging population and with a shrinking national census, we must find ways to care for those who live alone. Isolation can be a death knell.

- Bill Schubart

The last person executed in Vermont was Donald Demag on December 8, 1954. Demag committed two robberies and killed two people while doing so. He was electrocuted in the state’s electric chair.

Vermont retired the death penalty in 1972. Its instrument of death is stored at the Vermont Historical Society. Given public opinion, it’s unlikely that Vermont or nationwide, the other 23 states and the District of Columbia that have abolished the death penalty will soon reinstate it.

The US Supreme Court declared capital punishment “cruel and unusual” in the summer of 1972. By the millennium, 38 states had asserted their state’s rights and established local death penalty statutes to allow it.

In America, public support for the death penalty dropped from a 1994 high of 80% to 52% in 2025. The United States is one of the few “developed” countries in the world that retains a federal death penalty and Vermont has no legal means to prevent it within its borders if it is a federal prosecution. As of early 2025, approximately 150 countries have either abolished the death penalty entirely or maintain moratoria on executions. Roughly 55 countries still retain and use it.

I read the Supreme Court’s deliberation regarding the concoction of toxic pharmaceuticals our society uses to kill criminals in the states that still believe the death penalty is a deterrent to crime and an exception to Judeo-Christianity’s commandment not to kill. I was horrified to read that some of the debate focused on whether the paralyzing drug was injected to ensure that the person killed dies a “dignified death” or whether, in fact, spares the execution team, the victim’s family, and witnesses of the discomfort of seeing the visceral impact on the prisoner of the lethal chemicals at work.

With more than 550 people slated for execution, California has the largest death-row population in the country, and though no executions have taken place in almost 20 years, all of those lives are on the line.

With President Trump’s support for restoring the death penalty, in 2025, the United States saw a surge in executions after a period of decline. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, 47 people were put to death in 11 states, the highest annual execution total since 2009. In 2026, Florida leads in executions, followed by six other southern states. They believe in it.

Decades of criminal data indicate clearly and scientifically that there is little nourishment for those who see it as a deterrent. Most criminal behavior that elicits the death penalty is spontaneous rather than planned out. Former US Att. Gen. Janet Reno is on record as saying, “I have inquired for most of my adult life about studies that might show that the death penalty is a deterrent. And I have not seen any research that would substantiate that point.”

If it’s true that executions are indeed a deterrent to incipient offenders, why don’t we conduct them on prime-time TV and on town greens. We already round up alleged criminals and try them for the pleasure of TV viewers. If we did the same with executions, the High Court could then argue about lighting and cosmetics. But we execute in private. Could it be that we’re either ambivalent or ashamed?

Although execution as punishment in Vermont ended with only two people executed in the last 100 years, deaths at the hands of police continue. The Police Brutality Center reports that in 2025, “death-by-cop” in Vermont tripled since 2024 to three from none.

Criminal justice researchers cite deteriorating social adhesion, the increase in untreated mental illness and addiction disorders, a rise in gun ownership, and inadequate police-training and screening.

Recently, Tennessee called off the execution of Tony Carruthers, convicted in connection with three 1994 murders, after staff members were unable to find a vein to administer lethal injection drugs. Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican, issued a reprieve on Thursday, delaying any execution for a year. Mr. Carruthers’s case had already drawn attention, as his allies and his lawyers argued that he was wrongfully convicted. “Tennessee has effectively made the case against the death penalty,” says Laura Porter, the executive director of the U.S. Campaign to End the Death Penalty.

Vermont’s 332 State Troopers have an excellent reputation for training and performance. But Vermont has another dozen categories of policing whose standards for training or qualification are considerably less rigorous: local police, deputies, sheriffs, campus police, transportation, border patrol, security etc. Most carry deadly weapons, including tasers, and are authorized to use “deadly force” under certain circumstances. But how well-defined are the events that justify the use of “deadly force” and how well are potential users of deadly force trained?

There are no specific Vermont statutes on “use of force,” only individual department policies largely based on a model put forth by the VT League of Cities and Towns. Existing oversight requires that:

· Use of force must be reasonable and necessary to achieve a lawful objective.

· Officers must be trained to use de-escalation techniques before resorting to force.

· Deadly force is only permissible when there is an imminent threat to life.

· Officers must report all uses of force, including non-lethal methods.

· The use of force is subject to review and accountability measures.

· Citizens have the right to file complaints regarding excessive use of force.

But there’s a long-standing culture of not questioning men and women in uniform whether police, soldiers, priests, firefighters etc. A lack of statistical transparency and procedural review reflects this. “Improper use of force” investigations are sequestered as “personnel matters” and rarely see the light of day except as a final verdict in court. “The use of deadly force was deemed justified.” Matter closed.

As a condition of employment, reformers suggest that police agree that in any “use of deadly force” review their prior records relating to use of force be made available to examiners. Sometimes deadly force becomes a pattern with certain law enforcement personnel and should be considered in any investigation. Although we may have eliminated the part of the death penalty that occurs at the punitive end of the criminal justice system; can we now make sense of and manage the five seconds before the taking of a life at the “public safety” end?

And why are investigations when a uniformed officer of the state or municipality takes a life not subject to public oversight if they are in the service of “public safety? What explicit statutes are needed to define and evaluate the justification for lethal force?

And how and when will we begin to address the crisis that’s turning emergency rooms into temporary shelters and giving rise to more lethal events by law officers? Public safety officials are making a concerted effort to learn from and engage mental-health professionals in dealing with crises, but the dearth of mental-health professionals and treatment facilities makes their job difficult.

We have in place a network of Vermonters who understand and work within the criminal justice system: Circles of Support and Accountability (COSA), the 20 Regional Community Justice Centers, Dismas House, State’s Attorneys and Public Defenders and those working to create new pathways to reentry for offenders such as the ACLU-VT, Center for Crime Victim Services, and Vermonters for Criminal Justice Reform.

We could also reduce our prison population by half, using citizen and criminal justice tribunals to triage detainees who are in jail because they can’t afford bail, are sick and/or elderly (compassionate release), who have rebuilt their lives in prison, or have been reincarcerated for technical reasons like poverty or lack of housing.

Prisons themselves can be a death sentence, as evidenced by the death of two prisoners in Vermont. In March of 2026, Jose Luis Gonzalez, 51, of Connecticut, died at UVM Medical Center and two days later, Jonathan Stone, 37, of St. Johnsbury also died.

Most of the civilized world and most of its religions disapprove of the death penalty as a tool in the maintenance of a civilized society. More and more Americans, worried about the possibility of executing innocents, agree with them.

We might even compare the staggering damage wrought by corporate malfeasance on the scale of an Enron which arguably leaves more socio-economic carrion in its wake than a spontaneous, testosterone-crazed gang murder or convenience store hold-up, yet the white, wealthy malefactor will not be considered for the death penalty, while a non-white minor may well be.

The ethics of the death penalty may be argued forever by spiritual and religious leaders, but those who support executions are now a distinct minority here in America. Most of us reserve the right to end human life to our respective gods.

In our Vermont criminal justice system, we’ve decided not to kill offenders, but now we must push forward and ensure that our policies and practices do not “sentence” Vermonters to death by other means.

- Bill Schubart

The world is made better by hard work, especially hard work that enhances the common good and does not degrade nature. Earning money to support oneself and one’s family is a core element of the human condition. If one earns more than one needs and gives the excess away, either to the common good in the form of taxes or directly in the form of altruistic philanthropy, that, too, is beneficial. If one becomes addicted to the accretion of wealth for its own sake, that is a precarious and dangerous addiction like any other.

As my good friend Will Patten wrote in his book Rescuing Capitalism, Vermont Shows a Way, a balance of entrepreneurship, government regulation, taxation and commitment to one’s employees and community, vest both worker and employer in ways to achieve personal and community economic wellbeing.

Also, work is personally annealing. I can speak to that.

In my first job when I was age twelve, I worked for Volney Farr, our next-door neighbor, who had a successful dairy farm milking 28 Jersey cows. Before I walked to school, I’d go into his barn and open the 28 oak stanchions and walk “the girls” out to the pasture behind our house. When I returned from school, I went to the pasture, opened the gate and led the waiting cows back into the barn. Most remembered their stanchions and would go right to them and I would close them in. One or two might forget and so I’d lead them to the right one. Then I would go in to the farmhouse and Mrs. Farr would pour me a cup of hot cocoa and offer me one of her homemade donuts. Then I’d head home to start my homework.

In the summer haying season, I also worked forking hay to the back of a hay wagon as it tumbled down onto me from the haylift in the front to make room for more. When full, we’d go into the barn and a huge cast-iron hayfork would pick up the whole bundle and trolley it sideways, dropping it into the hayloft where we also played as kids.

I was proud of my work for Mr. Farr and even prouder when he taught me how to drive his Ford 640 tractor at age 14.

At 19, I moved to New York City to marry and find a job in the music industry. I got a menial job working for Sam Goody records for $68 /week. The job required me to join the Teamsters Union which I did. My employment was so short that my only benefit-harvest then was an eye exam and a pair of glasses in used frames with two different temples.

At 23, I was married with two kids and finishing a degree in French at UVM. I worked the student night shift at IBM for $62 / week. On graduating, I was hired at the recently opened Mt. Abraham Union High School teaching six classes of French a day and managing a homeroom first thing in the morning. My pay was $5800 a year, not quite enough to live on, so when school ended at 3:30, I’d ride my ancient motorcycle to Middlebury to work in the Vermont Book Shop until it closed at 7:00. Then I’d return home to my family in Vergennes.

Work would occasionally exhaust me, but I never found myself resenting the fact that I had to work to support myself and my emerging family. And as it turned out, my various workplace experiences also enriched my life with stories that later fed my writing.

Work is the personal or team energy that enables survival and even prosperity. It secures families and communities and multiplies new job opportunities. In an ideal world, the opportunity to work and the rewards it produces are equal for everyone. We are only catching up to equal pay for equal work. For example, women still earn typically 85% of what men do for the same job.

Also, unions are key to worker on-the-job safety conditions. The AFL-CIO recently published its 2026 annual report on workplace safety. In 2024, 380 workers a day died directly due to dangerous workplace conditions. 5070 workers were either killed or died on the job and an estimated 135,000 died from occupational diseases. There is a national campaign to get Amazon to allow to allow their employees to call 911 in an emergency.

Anti-union activity is pervasive among many employers, even as union-organizing is largely protected under law. Seven Days recently reported on efforts by Healthy Living in South Burlington, Williston and Saratoga Springs, New York to oppose their employees’ union-organizing efforts by engaging Sparta Solutions and Downs Rachlin Martin (DRM).

Perhaps, the best indicator of a productive society is the size of its “middle class” as measured against those in poverty and the top 1%. A common if little used metric for this is the “Gini index,” which compiles real income and distribution data to determine income and wealth inequality.

According to Forbes, between 1970 and 2021, “the share of U.S. aggregate income earned by the middle class shrank from formerly 62% to just 42%.” At the same time, aggregate earnings in the high-income group increased from 29% to 50%.

Meanwhile, the number of billionaires grew 50% from 2017 to 2025. The NY Times reports, “The top 1 percent of American households, which have a minimum net worth of $11.1 million, now collectively own about $25.6 trillion worth of stocks and mutual funds, the same amount as the remaining 99 percent of the country, according to the Federal Reserve.”

When it comes to the average earner, perhaps the key metric for the wellbeing of workers is how many are represented by unions. The state-by-state number varies widely from 24.8% in Hawaii and 21.3% in New York to 2.5% in North Carolina and 2.3% in South Dakota.

The “Golden Age” for the American middle class came right after World War II during the Eisenhower era. By 1960, the majority of American families lived in houses they owned. The ‘50s and ‘60s also saw a huge growth in the American trade union movement. In 1982 there were only 13 billionaires. As of December 2025, there are over 900.

Let’s be honest with each other, America is not well-served by such an explosion in wealth disparity. Unionization is a valuable tool to advance income equality, grow a productive middle class and make our country stronger economically.

Today, the average worker cannot afford healthcare insurance, a home of their own, or childcare.

The current federal administration’s abandonment of the poor and middle classes in favor of their technocracy has cast an economic pall over our country today and most Americans know it.

If you want to know the gap between a livable wage for yourself or your family where you live, log on to the MIT Living Wage indicator. For example, for a Burlington, Vermont family of two working parents with two children, each working parent would need to net $48.09 / hour. A single parent would need to net $79.27 / hour. Vermont minimum wage today is $14.42 / hour. The federal minimum wage has remained at $7.25 / hour since 2009.

Workers of the World Unite!

Bill Schubart

One can donate to a nonprofit to help advance its mission for purely altruistic reasons that support a common good.

One can donate to a nonprofit to establish authority over it. i.e. “Here’s $10M to build a new gym at your college. Now, fire those leftist liberals in the econ department.”

Or one can donate to a nonprofit to advance one’s own vision devoid of mission consistency or community input, i.e. Eli Goldsmith-Lesser’s decision to fund and raise money for a $5.5M dollar redesign of Champlain Valley Unified School District’s (CVU) athletic playing fields. The redesign will convert its Field B natural lawns to artificial turf and add bleachers, lighting, and expanded parking.

Lesser-Goldsmith, a resident of Charlotte, one of the towns within the school district, is the owner and operator of Healthy Living in South Burlington and Williston, Vermont ,and Saratoga Springs, New York. In a personal conversation with him, he conveyed to me his commitment to develop a major regional athletic hub for CVU that will, he says, expand team participation, family and community engagement and be a potential source of rental revenue.

In a press release last fall, Lesser-Goldsmith said, “In addition to athletics, the new field would serve as the school’s only space large enough for all students to gather outdoors for events, performances, and school-wide activities…. This project will bring people together for years to come.”

Responsible Growth Hinesburg sponsored a meeting on Friday, April 10^, at Hinesburg’s Carpenter-Carse library and invited well-qualified environmentalist scientists and community leaders to come together to explore shared concerns regarding the installation of artificial turf on the playing fields of CVU. Several presenters spoke in favor of reconstructing the playing fields, but with appropriate drainage, natural soil and organic grass.

Panelists included: Marguerite Adelman, Vermont PFAS Coalition Coordinator; Kyla Bennett, former EPA Wetlands Enforcement Coordinator; David Bond, professor at Bennington College; Irene Wrenner, Vermont State Senator for Chittenden North in 2023-24 and a co-sponsor of what became Act 131 – the ban on manufacturing and installing artificial turf containing PFAS in Vermont.

“When we think about artificial turf, in some ways, it’s akin to installing an effluent pipe of a plastics plant in the heart of our community,” suggested David Bond who previously led efforts to respond to the discovery of PFAS in Bennington.” Bond further reminded the audience of the $34M Saint-Gobain Performance Plastics settlement in 2021 in which the Teflon plastics manufacturer agreed to compensate the community for damage to wells and water systems. A report from Bennington College showed the facility’s airborne pollution left “a definable plume of elevated PFOA levels” in soil throughout an area that “appears to cover approximately 120 square miles,” extending to North Bennington, Bennington and Shaftsbury, according to the state Department of Environmental Conservation.

The discussion ran entirely against the proposal. One presenter cited an article in The Guardian indicating that athletes who play on artificial turf are more likely to be coated with higher levels of toxic PFAs “forever chemicals.”

Hinesburg resident Marie Eddy posted a video on the local Front Porch Forum that made a strong case against installation of artificial turf.

This March 10^th letter to the Nantucket School Board from Ph.D. Diana Zuckerman of The National Center for Health Research was quoted widely and made clear the scientific concerns around artificial turf and the inadequate testing for “forever chemicals.”

On April 14, 2026, the CVU School Board held a regular meeting at which some members of the community and students weighed in, both in favor and in opposition to the installation of artificial turf. (The testimony on turf begins about an hour into the meeting.) The underlying concern appears to be whether the community at large will have a voice in CVU’s decision to install artificial turf in the highlands above CVU or whether it will be solely a CVU Board decision, since the school itself and the community below will be impacted by the decision.

Put simply, Is the decision institutional or community-driven, as the science indicates both will be impacted by the installation? Patrick Brook drains the fields above CVU into the central village. Will PFAs “forever chemicals” flow into the village and leach into the town water system and aquifer from which many local wells also draw water?

But the underlying issue is really… should the $5.5M personal vision of a local philanthropist be the determinant of a community’s future or, should their generosity be subject to what science tells us?

Does the raw power of a $5.5M gift outweigh the need for scientific investigation into the long-term safety of the donor’s vision for his or her community?

Finally, how much personal satisfaction does $5.5M buy, and at what cost to the common good?

-- Bill Schubart

In the technocratic, financial, and political morass that characterizes modern healthcare, it’s vital that society and its authorized regulators find a fair and consistent metric to evaluate the quality and effectiveness of its hospitals and integral healthcare systems.

Of the many indicators currently in use, most are diagnostic rather than prescriptive. For example…dividing a hospital’s total budget into labor costs spent delivering direct patient care (clinical) and labor costs spent on bureaucracy (admin. and management and overhead) provides an analysis of how bloated a system is and demonstrates the need to manage and limit hospital revenue as it relates to operating expenses. But it doesn’t provide a means of setting a corrective goal and functional path to cost-efficiency.

An egregious example of administrative bloat here in Vermont is evident in the University of Vermont Medical Center’s (UVMMC) 60 vice-presidents earning between $300,000 and $600,000 annually, each of whom has between 3 and 27 staff members reporting to them. It appears that just four of the 60 positions are related to direct patient care. Total current cost of these VP positions now exceeds $23M as shown in the FY 2024 990s filed by the UVMHN/UVMMC/UVM Medical Group. With the addition of $10M in salaries paid to the Medical Group’s Board Members, the total expenditure for paid administrative leadership reaches $33.4M.

It’s important to note that this data is intrinsic to prior leadership under Dr. Sunny Eappen, who on Jan 5, 2026, was replaced by Dr. Stephen Leffler as president of the consolidated UVMHN/UVMMC/UVM Medical Group. As the new head, Dr. Leffler has committed to bring operating expenses to the goal of “managing to Medicare” … but within five years.

“Managing to Medicare” is the most promising formula for controlling costs while offering a path to population health -- quality, affordability, and access. Another term is “Reference-based Pricing (RFB),” but RFB can be interpreted more ambiguously. Of the two, “Managing to Medicare” is the most easily understood and applicable. Several systems have used it successfully to manage growth in operating expenses without negatively impacting their mission to provide direct patient care.

Hospitals typically complain that Medicare doesn’t pay enough to cover their costs -- the implication being that costs of direct patient care aren’t covered, when, in reality, further analysis shows they’re attributing all costs, including administration, management and overhead to “direct patient care.” This is the underlying cause of budget-bloat.

Medicare payments are determined by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) in a defined and transparent process that can vary with zip code. The goal is to adequately reimburse cost-efficient hospitals for their work. CMS sets appropriate reimbursement rates for physician services, medical devices, and pharmaceuticals based on regular assessments of actual cost. As a rural state with an aging population, Vermont is paid more than the national average, some $9,396 per case, the ninth highest in the U.S. as reported on page eleven of the Healthcare Resource Allocation Plan (HRAP) report to the Green Mountain Care Board (GMCB).

Based on factual data for FY2023, as reported by Rees Partners, it’s distinctly possible to manage to Medicare reimbursements -- some 73 of 103 academic medical centers, adjusted for similar discharge rates and acuity, actually either break even or make a modest profit on Medicare reimbursements. The average margin for those 73 hospitals was $5,000 per case. It can be done and, as such, makes the concept of managing to Medicare an appropriate regulatory guideline, as well as an appropriate management tool for hospitals looking to maximize cost-efficiency and deliver on the mission of population health.

Vermont Healthcare 911 recently held a regional webinar on Reference-based Pricing that brought together national experts:

· Marilyn Bartlett presented an overview of Montana’s experience

· Margaret Smith gave an overview of Oregon’s successful experiment with RFB

· Roz Murray of the Center for Advancing Health Policy Research (CAHPR) at Brown University School of Public Health gave a presentation on using RFB for regulatory guidance as well as…

· Brown University’s Center for Advancing Healthcare Policy Research’s (CAHPR) report commissioned by the Green Mountain Care Board on Reference-Based Pricing

There’s more detail here than the average reader is going to delve into, but the reports above give crystal-clear guidance to healthcare policy professionals on the wisdom of using “Managing-to-Medicare” as a goal to deliver on mission.

By way of example: If UVM Medical Center Hospital (UVMMC) were to simply begin by managing to 250% of Medicare reimbursements, it would save some $278M annually. If it were to be more restrictive and manage to 200% of Medicare, it would save $445M in the first year. UVMMC managing to Medicare during FT2024 would have saved $12,943 per Medicare discharge or $273M on 21,056 discharges which accounts for 12% of its operating expenses.

If the Green Mountain Care Board (GMCB), The Vermont Agency of Human Services (AHS), the Legislature’s House Committee on Healthcare, and, more broadly, Vermonters align themselves with the idea of managing over time to this simple, transparent metric, we can reach the goal together of achieving a quality, affordable and accessible healthcare system for all Vermonters.

-Bill Schubart

Disclosure: I serve on the Board of VHC911.0rg

I flop down into my seat - there’s no nice way to say it. To make matters worse my left thigh overflows into my annoyed seatmate’s space on one of the two facing bench seats as the train speeds away from the platform in Greenwich. It’s at the end of the car where the two blue Naugahyde seats face one another. The coach is redolent of coffee and a disorienting mix of fragrances emanating from the city’s cubicle-dwellers. I’m sitting across from a fat girl who is not a businessperson. She nibbles around the edge of a blueberry muffin and clutches a brown paper bag, translucent with grease. She has no purse. Crumbs speckle her neon-blue blouse with its deep décolletage and the pale white breasts trussed into it. Thin veins spider across her white flesh like the map of a river drainage basin. She is looking out the window, avoiding my gaze, although she senses it.

I wear loose-fitting clothes to conceal my fat, an expanse of oxford shirt over chino slacks. There is no subtlety to her fat, exaggerated by tight-fitting jeans and polyester blouse. How can she walk, bulging in those tight jeans? She looks up and catches me staring, perhaps wondering if I’m interested in her. I smile and look away.

I’m not a commuter, but this is familiar terrain. I’m making my way to the city to help empty the contents of grandmother’s apartment. I wonder why the fat girl is going into the city. She looks out the window again and appears to be listening to one of the many airborne cellphone conversations. A man is assuring his wife that he loves her even though he will be late again tonight. From his defensive tone it’s easy to guess that the wife is not happy.

I brace my bulk as the train rounds a curve at speed. My seatmate shifts his weight defensively. The girl, alone in her seat, also adjusts her position to compensate for the centrifugal force exerted by the fast-moving train. She clings to the bag as if it were her lifeline. Cell phone conversations compete with track noise. From my many childhood trips along these tracks I recall the hypnotic da-duh, da-duh, da-duh of wheels clicking over bolted joints in the now-welded rails. Today the noise is steady, arrhythmic, a shrill hum except for the occasional screech of steel as the train rounds a curve or the engineer brakes for bad track.

When the coach door opens and the punch-wielding conductor walks in, grabbing seat backs for balance, the train noises intensify, as if someone brushed a volume knob in error. Inside the car I make out snippets of conversation as, outside, the tenement windows flying by afford an occasional glimpse of the lives within. I have no phone or paper so I look out the window, careful to avoid the gaze of the girl, who continues to nibble around the edge of her diminishing muffin. Station platforms scroll by the window as the express train speeds toward Manhattan.

I’m thinking ahead to the physical and emotional exertions of helping my grandmother sort through and haul away the accumulation of her generation. But my attention keeps returning to the fat girl. We’ve somehow managed to park our bulks so that our knees don’t touch. I imagine the round contours of pale flesh overflowing her tight clothes and underwear. The fat around her middle bulges out to meet and support her substantial breasts. She pulls down her blouse when she sees me looking at her again. I’ve made her uncomfortable. She hikes herself sideways on the seat as if to look away, but instead she is trying to reach something squeezed into her jeans pocket. Now she must extend her right leg. It touches mine. She excuses herself with a faint smile. She gets her hand into the tight pocket and with some difficulty extracts a cell phone that she brings to her ear, greeting the caller. Above the din of the coach, I had not heard it ring but it might have been on vibrate.

It’s the same conversation I’ve heard a hundred times between lovers, assurances of love and longing, discreet recountings of intimate moments, promises of fidelity and reunion. I wonder if she is on her way to meet her lover in New York, and if her lover is also is fat. For a moment I’m consumed with the complex ergonomics of their love making with all its lipid impediments. There were enough embarrassments of ineptitude when I first made love, when I was younger and thinner. I’ve avoided it—or perhaps love has avoided me, as a fat person. I wonder if her lover is kind to her. I recall my stepfather once asking me, “So now you know how to use a woman to come, but have you learned to make love to her?”

The tenements give way to massive warehouses, empty streets, and an occasional diner. The girl ends with an expression of love and she again struggles to replace the phone into her tight pocket.

For the first time, she speaks to me. “I’m sorry, it was my boyfriend. We are engaged. He is stationed upstate and we only get to see each other when he visits his mother in New York City. I hope I didn’t bother you.”

“Not at all.”

“Do you have a girlfriend?” she asks.

“Not right now. I did but it didn’t work out.”

“I’m sorry. You seem so nice.”

“Thank you.” I fix my gaze out the window as the train rolls through the industrial sidings of Queens, occasionally tossing us against one another as we pass a switch and change tracks at speed.

As the train moves on into Harlem and miles of tenements, the girl extends the bag she is clutching and offers me a doughnut. But I am no longer comfortable eating in public. I fear the reproach of those around me, watching a fat man eating fattening food. It’s safer to eat alone.

I watch the drape of fat swinging from her extended arm. I unconsciously straighten my shoulders as if to remind myself of the muscles I once earned from years of farm work, although my arms, too, are now encased in fat. I’ve not lifted a bale since going away to school.

She withdraws the bag and her smile fades with our loss of connection. The lights flicker as the train enters the tunnel beneath Park Avenue and begins screeching through the outer arteries of Grand Central.

I recognize the dusty lights, jolting turns, even the graffiti in the tunnels. I wonder if she has been here before. The cubicle-dwellers are stowing papers into briefcases and setting coffee cups on the floor for others to remove. The smell of spilt coffee overwhelms even the ambient after-shave.

Over the screaming of steel, I hear a squeaking sound. I look over to see the fat girl quietly sobbing. I do not want to engage; I am less than a minute from sprinting out of her life—as much as a fat man can sprint. Yet I can no longer pretend to be distracted by the world outside the train windows.

“Are you okay?”

She sniffles, gathering herself for a response.

“You knew, didn’t you?”

“Knew what?” I ask.

“There was no one there,” she answers with a convulsive sob that lifts her chin off her breast.

“What do you mean?”

“On the phone,” she says. Her eyes are red and swollen.

The train stops in a blaze of platform light and jostling commuters fill the aisles.

“There was no one on the other end.”

— Bill Schubart

What is Private Equity (P.E.)? Neither intrinsically bad nor good, like many financial and technical tools, it can be used for either. However, to avoid damage to mission-driven organizations like nonprofits, P.E. must be regulated.

Unlike a startup loan, which must be repaid, the business model of private equity is often to harvest their investment when the company becomes successful, with little or no concern for community impact. The investors can sell their equity shares at a significant private profit while negatively impacting the public. As a financing tool it can create value, jobs and wealth. Alternatively, it can doom a startup to failure. It depends on how investors choose to exercise their management influence and whether or not there are any regulatory guardrails.

Private Equity is often confused with “Venture Capital” (VC). Venture capital is different in that investors “seed-fund” startups or emerging companies with needed growth capital to scale up operations. In return they often get a significant ownership stake as well as a management role in decision-making. VC is generally more interested in long-term mutual gain as opposed to short-term private extraction.

I was part of a startup trio that in the mid-‘80s merged two companies into a new company called Resolution. At our peak, we were grossing $12M a year, had over 200 employees and an array of satisfied national clients. In 2008, I retired as president. Soon after, our board decided to sell to a private-equity firm which ruthlessly cut costs, many of which were at the heart of our high-quality service. Our clients left in droves and within two years, the company was bankrupt and 200 jobs in Chittenden County had disappeared.

I know the downside of private equity.

The underlying question is whether P.E. can or is willing to ethically manage the intrinsic conflict between preserving the costs that support a quality service while trimming excessive management and administrative costs unrelated to client satisfaction.

Vermont is one of the few states that has no comprehensive “Corporate Practice of Medicine” doctrine embedded in law. The Corporate Practice of Medicine (CPOM) Doctrine is a legal principle that prohibits non-physicians and corporations from owning or controlling medical practices. This is a long-established legal doctrine in most states that ensures that medical decisions remain in the hands of licensed professionals and that healthcare is patient-focused rather than profit-driven. However, due to lack of reporting requirements and enforcement, as well as the proliferation of corporate legal loopholes, this doctrine is frequently violated with no legal consequence.

In the last few years, Private Equity HAS acquired a number of residential nursing and care homes in Vermont. Stories are rife about the decline in care and service that followed. Private equity-backed Genesis HealthCare sold six Vermont nursing home facilities before declaring bankruptcy.

Private equity has also invested widely in veterinary services in Vermont. Why? As one P.E. exec laughingly told me, “People spend more on their pets than on their kids.”

Concerns about the growing influence of P.E. investment in healthcare generated a large research project at Brown University in the Private Equity Stakeholder Project designed to impartially evaluate the impact of P.E.’s entry into healthcare. Their data and those of many other similar studies across the nation consistently show that private-equity ownership and control is associated with higher costs, higher prices, worse outcomes, and healthcare provider burnout.

At present, Oregon leads the nation in passing two laws last session that regulate P.E.’s management of the practice of medicine and close loopholes to prevent private equity control over medical practices.

Key to these regulations are:

 Setting legal standards for how management services organizations may shape management of a medical practice

 redefining the list of business entities that are permitted to engage in the practice of medicine

 addressing the widespread use of noncompete and other restrictive agreements imposed on physicians and healthcare professionals

The current Vermont bill (H.583) under consideration in the Legislature very much aligns with legislation adopted in Oregon, Massachusetts, and California to prohibit the corporate practice of medicine in Vermont. If passed, it would require all healthcare institutions to fully disclose their ownership structure. It would also prohibit private-equity firms from taking control of medical practices or hospitals and protect physician decision-making from corporate influence as well as create a robust enforcement mechanism led by the State Attorney General.

Yet eddies of strong opposition are swirling around the bill, including from provider lobbying organizations like the Vermont Medical Society, Vermont Health Care Association and the Vermont Association of Hospitals and Health Systems (VAHHS). Their concerns appear to be rooted in the fear that regulations will inhibit needed investment in Vermont’s healthcare system and unfairly infringe upon the apparent right of a doctor’s office (business) to sell to whomever they choose. It’s important to note that individual rights -- even from a libertarian perspective – business or otherwise – do not override systemic harm when such harms are predictable, particularly to patients. You have a right to sell your car to any buyer, but will you sell it to someone who you know is going to crash into the community center to collect insurance? The right to sell a practice should not outweigh the right to affordable, high-quality care already enshrined in Vermont state statute.

As a former chair of Fletcher Allen Health Care, appointed immediately after its then - President Bill Boettcher was sentenced to two years in a federal penitentiary for lying under oath to healthcare regulators, I’m familiar with the risks and opportunities of Vermont’s healthcare infrastructure. I now serve on the Board of VHC911.org, a broad coalition of Vermonters, business executives and unions working together to improve Vermont’s broken healthcare system. Their latest findings report was just published. Our extensive work analyzing hospital data indicates that the mission of “population health,” measured in quality, accessibility and affordability, is failing in Vermont. Recent findings indicate that Vermont has the most expensive healthcare costs and healthcare insurance rates in the country.

Are we really comfortable commingling the profit motive with nonprofit mission? If we do not regulate the incursion of private equity into such an essential human need and public good as healthcare, we will only accelerate the chaos of current failure. Where’s the logic behind letting a private for-profit entity take over institutions meant to provide public health?

The most respected ethical council in healthcare is the American Medical Association’s (AMA) Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs. Their overview of the role of business and the mission of healthcare is unequivocal: “Prioritizing profits over patients is incompatible with physicians’ ethical obligations.” It’s hard to understand why some Vermont provider lobbies appear significantly less skeptical of the harms of corporate practice of medicine than the American Medical Society.

Contact your legislators today and let them know that you support H.583 regulating private equity’s role in Vermont’s healthcare system.

Business and nonprofits can work together but only as long as the goals of each are clearly defined…profits and social mission in support of the common good.

--Bill Schubart

Platform Guidelines:

- Ignore the current administration and their failings,

- Lay out how today’s Democratic Party will better the lives of workers and restore a foundering working class,

- Will be guided by ethical, legal, and Constitutional principles,

- Champion the common good over the good of the 0.01%.

When elected the Democratic Party will:

Focus on the wellbeing of Americans of every income level and their needs,

Protect the rights of workers to unionize,

Regulate new and emerging technologies to the benefit of their customers not just their owners,

Restore antitrust legislation to eliminate monopoly-market dominance,

And alleviate skyrocketing costs of living in these areas:

Food: No American shall live without access to nutritious food: 40% of the US food supply is wasted, and that equates to 325 pounds of waste per person per year. Food waste in America is worth about $218 billion and is the equivalent of 130 billion meals. One reason for waste is “sell-by” dates which have been proven to be a false indicator of food quality or safety. Educate consumers. Expand hunger-relief organizations while integrating them into the current system of local food production and distribution. Regulate ultra-processed foods (UPFs) in our schools and civic institutions.

Healthcare: We will advocate for healthcare becoming a government-guaranteed right as it is in 73 other countries, rather than a $5.3 trillion for-profit industry enriching few and bankrupting others. Every American will have access to primary, specialty and urgent care, including mental illness and addiction recovery. Science will lead healthcare decisions, not politics or ideology. At 40%, medical debt is a leading cause of personal bankruptcy filings. We will develop programs to discount and buy down the personal medical debt of 41% of Americans.

Housing: Increase federal funding to the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) to incent and enable consumer opportunities to access affordable mortgages, invest in community-owned housing stock, and expand availability of energy rebates for updating existing housing stock. We will regulate private equity investment in vacant housing stock.

Electricity: Regulate construction of new AI data centers while investing in environmentally secure new generation capacity such as the AP1000 nuclear reactor, solar fields, and wind and off-shore generation.

Finance: Deploy a wealth tax on annual incomes over $2M a year to migrate money into investments for the common good (below). We will regulate credit card rates and expand the 2009 federal minimum wage from $7.25/hour to what would constitute a true livable wage.

Public Education: We will invest in and expand regional community colleges to make college more affordable and in professional certification programs that enable learners to acquire a “certification of professional accomplishment” opening job opportunities. We will invest in Federal Student Aid to enable college-debt forgiveness programs in exchange for ongoing service in public roles and expand federal investment in “baby bonds” to give young people a leg up as they enter the workforce.

Worker Safety: Build dialogue and a shared accident d/b between OSHA and major unions to strengthen worker safety regulation and inspection.

Criminal Justice: Incarcerating a larger percent of its population than most developed countries including Russia, the U.S. spends some $80B annually on corrections in state, federal and for-profit prisons. Reinvest this money upstream in mental health and addiction services, trauma remediation and job training. All prisons and jails will be state or federal. We will eliminate for-profit and concierge prisons and expand community restorative-justice committees. Prosecute fully crimes of physical, sexual abuse, and pedophilia regardless of the wealth or stature of the defendant. And most important…we will ensure the safety and wellbeing of our children.

- Bill Schubart

The appearance of modern homo sapiens around 300,000 years ago led to survival tribalism. The emergence of divinity-inspired religions began in 1900 BCE with Vedic Hinduism, followed by Judaism in 1800 BCE, Buddhism in 5^th Century BCE, Christianity at the dawn of the Christian Era (CE) and Islam in the 7^th Century CE. Then, the Medieval Period began in 476 with the collapse of the Roman Empire and rise of regional monarchies, initially through conquest, then substantiated by the “divine right” of kings. The Enlightenment followed in the late 17^th century leading to a renaissance and redefinition of earlier Greek “democracy” infused with an understanding of the “common good.”

Imagine an arc arising out of humankind’s first appearance on earth beginning with tribalism focused on survival, followed by the emergence of religions started by divinely-inspired human prophets. These religions could then become self-serving moral authorities focused on maintaining power, wealth, and control of knowledge, abetted by the rise of monarchies, in which all power is vested in the king and his chosen court of conforming acolytes.

Then came the Enlightenment, [also called “The Age of Reason,”] which offered humankind an alternative to a simplistic view of “God and King” by elevating humanity’s experiential knowledge. It gave birth to the idea that more than just oligarchs might create personal wealth. This genesis of capitalism enabled a tradesperson to create, sell, barter, and retain the value of their craft without the proceeds being seized by a king.

Succeeding centuries have brought forth a whirlwind of scientific, technical, economic and social progress that brings us to this moment in humankind’s 3000 centuries on earth. Our current era is perhaps best defined by Gaia’s challenge to her human inhabitants and the ensuing toxic impact we inflict on her air, waters, and soils in our pursuit of progress. We can only guess the next chapters.

Perhaps we are at the point where we should pause to unravel and rethink the legacy of some of the beliefs that prior eras have imposed on us.

How did religion define moral turpitude, AKA “sin”? How did monarchies justify the accretion of vast wealth with no regard for a common good?

Let’s start by reexamining the religious commandments imposed on humanity.

Raised a Catholic, I was indoctrinated with the ethos of a church already beginning to lose its grip on the young. Suicide, masturbation (“self-abuse”), abortion, gender fluidity, divorce, homosexuality, polygamy, erotic literature or images, adultery, celibacy for religious orders, polytheism, envy (admiration?) of another’s wife or possessions, and eating meat on Friday were among the many sins.

Like most states, Vermont decriminalized suicide attempts years ago and in 2013 passed Act 39, the Patient Choice and Control at the End of Life Act legalizing what some call “physician-assisted suicide” or “Death with Dignity.”

In the 11^th century, Pope Gregory the VII imposed priesthood celibacy to stop priests from leaving their estates to their families and require them to leave them to the Church.

Masturbation is now understood as a naturally occurring and physically beneficial exercise across many species.

Abortion was made legal in the Roe Decision in 1973 and then again made illegal in 2022 under the Dobbs decision, ignoring the rights of women to have control over their own bodies. In time, Dobbs will almost certainly be overturned.

Vermont led the nation in 1999 when its Supreme Court asserted the right of same-sex couples to unite in Baker v. Vermont. And in 2009, the Vermont Legislature passed the Civil Unions bill allowing same-sex couples to marry legally.

Pornography has existed since humans existed, early examples were cave drawings, statuary, then painting, magazines and finally online.

Algerian Cave Drawing

Are we returning to a point in the arc of history where the emergence of “kings” is again upon us?

The genesis of modern capitalism during the Enlightenment enabled peasants to add economic value by creating and selling their goods to buy property. Community markets emerged, followed by shops. But haunted by the seductive memory of vast fortune and power, the late 19^th century “robber barons” arose in this country, monarchs of capitalism run amok.

At the turn of that century, President Theodore Roosevelt introduced the “Square Deal” and the “Sherman Antitrust Act” in a regulatory effort to break up trusts and monopolies and share the wealth of the “robber barons.”

Twenty-five years later, his distant cousin, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, initiated “The New Deal” to foster and protect an emerging middleclass of American workers and slow a return to the disparity of wealth. Regulation and taxation became an integral part of legislative efforts to deter monopolies and encourage market competition as a means of letting consumer choice drive growing economic markets.

Humankind’s up-and-down history permitting the accretion of massive wealth alongside crushing poverty, then initiating efforts to reduce the wealth disparity, salvage a working middleclass, and reduce the inhuman impacts of poverty continues today as we watch another record-breaking upswing of wealth accumulation and plutocratic power alongside a steep projected increase in U.S. poverty, and the decimation of a working middle class.

Since 1983, the number of billionaires in the U.S. has grown from 15 to over 800. Ariano Campo-Flores of the Wall Street Journal recently reported that the top .01% of U.S. households now hold assets worth $23 trillion this year while the bottom 50% held less than a quarter of that at $4.2T. Elon Musk has made headlines with his successful demand for a compensation package of one trillion dollars at $100B a year.

Just as religion has been used by adherents to justify their extreme wealth, many religious institutions have amassed massive fortunes. How does the Catholic Church justify its estimated net worth of $73B when its core mission is feeding the poor and sheltering the homeless? How much would the sale of its assets and real estate do to stem the impacts of world poverty.

The concept of a wealth tax has resurfaced and is under renewed debate, even as the billionaire class exerts their political power to prevent or evade it. Might we again establish a socio-economic environment where one can work and thrive with the help of wider unionization and a progressive income tax, as we had in the Eisenhower era, or a tax on extreme assets?

A well-researched recent book by Chuck Collins entitled “Burned by Billionaires” details chapter by chapter, with supporting data, how plutocrats are destroying the environment, shifting taxes away from themselves to the middle class, diminishing affordable housing, expanding racial division, profiting from an unaffordable healthcare system, and eroding democracy.

If we are to right the economic ship, we must amend labor laws and encourage union organization, initiate changes in corporate governance to give workers more of a stake in their own employment and nullify Citizens United in order to return voice and power to citizens themselves instead of their wealthy employers.

We must invest in affordable public housing and raise the unconscionably low federal minimum wage from $7.25/hour ($15,000/year). The MIT Livable Wage Calculator sets $40.48 per hour for a working couple in Burlington, Vermont, with two children — six times federal minimum wage and almost three times Vermont’s minimum wage of $14.01.

As we examine the accepted verities of humankind’s long time on earth, we must reexamine all the evolved assumptions and question them in the light of today. When does love become jealousy? And when does a war of defense morph into a war of aggression? When does spiritual faith become self-serving orthodoxy? A basic tenet of every world religion commands us to care for the poor, the sick, the homeless, and the hungry.

But as we ask ourselves these questions, the one sacred axiom that must survive our time on earth is the critical need to protect our children from adverse childhood experiences such as neglect, hunger, homelessness, and physical and sexual abuse. Our children are our hope for the future. As we examine all the false narratives we’ve evolved, the one that must never change across the millennia is the need to protect our children.

--Bill Schubart

But when challenged for clarity on their own positions on contentious issues, many politicians, subservient to and daunted by those who keep them in power, defer to what I would call “word shelters.” We see MAGA foot soldiers in Congress marching to the beat of their leader’s drum and parroting handy “talking points” such as “to prevent waste, fraud and abuse.”

By way of example on the January 22, 2026 PBS Evening News: “Sen. Chuck Grassley, [R-Iowa] asked Russell Vought, Trump’s nominee to lead the Office of Management and Budget, about government whistleblowers, especially those who expose improper government spending and action.” His reply: “I think the whistleblowers play an enormous role in helping us weed out waste, fraud and abuse.”

Meanwhile, our widely popular and likable Governor, when asked about the serious financial challenges facing his constituents, evokes “affordability,” a catch-all phrase that shields its user from specific prescriptions for addressing it or what he plans to do about it. “Affordability” is a careless euphemism lumping together real problems in public education, healthcare, housing, criminal justice, the environment, public transportation, rather than starting the vital process of in-depth analysis, discussion, articulation, and action.

Our Governor laid out a plan for reducing the cost of public education, but then largely failed to engage constituents in the conversation. This led many to pushback. So his New Year State-of-the-State Address became, for the most part, a my-way-or-the-highway diktat.

To his credit, the recent ICE execution of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis did elicit a forceful condemnation from our governor: “At best, these federal immigration operations are a complete failure of coordination of acceptable public safety and law enforcement practices, training, and leadership… . At worst, it’s a deliberate federal intimidation and incitement of American citizens that’s resulting in the murder of Americans. Again, enough is enough.”

But the statement was made with no reference to President Trump, Stephen Miller, Vice President J.D. Vance, or Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, the architects of ICE and U.S. Border Patrol’s murderous onslaught against Minneapolis citizens. What is our governor afraid of? May Hanlon, executive director of the Vermont Democratic Party, was clear: “Performative neutrality in the face of clear harm is not leadership,” she wrote in a clarion call to Vermonters.

Evasive language may be seductive. After all who isn’t opposed to “waste, fraud and abuse” or who doesn’t want to tackle “affordability.” But these language umbrellas and talking points do little more than allow their users to evade answers that might lead to solutions and offend those to whom they owe political fealty.

Where’s the clear-spoken leadership we need?

I’ll spare you another self-evident diatribe about how as a nation under Trump and Steven Miller and their technocratic acolytes, we’re becoming more like the Weimar Republic every day. You probably know that already or at least are beginning to wonder about it.

Though born in Manhattan, I’ve lived in Vermont for 79 years. I’ve been politically aware since Governor Dean C. Davis’s term from 1969-1973. Governors Tom Salmon, Madeleine Kunin, Dick Snelling, Howard Dean, Jim Douglas, and Peter Shumlin were all at least acquaintances, if not, in some cases, confidantes.

In retrospect, I would say that, with the exception of Governors Davis, Kunin and Snelling, who were powerful initiators -- and for a different reason, Howard Dean and Peter Shumlin – that the others like our current governor were competent guardians of the status quo. Dean and Shumlin tried to innovate in the healthcare crisis but faced the reality that the healthcare crisis is largely national and that fixes to improve Vermont’s “population health” would need to focus on the art of the possible within the Vermont healthcare infrastructure, as recent citizen efforts have proven. The solutions they both sought in the three branches of government were largely unsuccessful but helped focus attention on the depth of the problem.

As yet, we don’t know if our apparently popular Governor is running for another term or not. There’s been only one declared challenger, Professor Esther Charlestin from Middlebury. Political scuttlebutt and some hints from the candidates themselves such as appearing at town hall discussions around the state, suggest that either Vermont State Treasurer Mike Pieciak or Vermont Attorney General Charity Clark might consider a run.

Assuming that a field of credible candidates eventually declares in time for debates before November 3rd, Vermonters will confront a serious choice. Are we going to choose the candidate we like or the candidate we need to begin to tackle Vermont’s crippling challenges hidden under the word umbrella, “affordability?”

n Bill Schubart

Former surgeon general of the United States Vikram Murthy both defined and warned us against the serious impacts of loneliness, saying, “Loneliness is actually so much more than a bad feeling. In addition to increasing the risk of mental health issues such as depression, anxiety, and suicide, it also increases the chance for physical diseases including stroke, heart disease, and dementia—in numbers that are comparable to smoking and obesity…” He further added, “Social media has become a central factor in the loneliness epidemic,” noting it has “fundamentally changed how we relate to each other. And as our interaction with others is increasingly online, so too has incivility escalated. We say things sometimes that are quite judgmental and hurtful to other people online that we would never, ever, ever, ever say to them face to face.”

And now with the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI), we can create deadly new fantasy worlds to live in and further escape our human communities of family, friends and neighbors.

Combine this with the slow death of our town centers caused by de-industrialization and urbanization -- the scholarly term for which is “shrinking cities and towns (SCT) -- and we’re left with less to sustain our sense of communal wellbeing.

On a recent trek to Quebec, my wife and I drove up through Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom and saw everywhere the sheets of plywood covering former storefronts. We’d see a gas station/convenience store selling fossil fuels, liquor, tobacco, THC vapes, candy, soda, lottery tickets, ultra-processed food (UPFs), and enticements for online-sports gambling -- auto and human filling stations -- a death knell for our towns.

It’s essential to our state and to the country that we understand the full spectrum of what primary care means and to acknowledge that it goes far beyond human physiology and medicine.

Yes, we need to graduate and retain more primary-care doctors, physician assistants (PAs) and nurses, and yes, we need fewer specialists. But we also need to make it affordable for these providers to live in Vermont.

To make matters worse, the Trump administration’s recent effort to exclude nursing from its definition of a “professional degree” for the purpose of federal student loan limits, is a decision that effectively de-professionalizes the field and will only deepen current nursing shortages.

According to the nonprofit Health Care Cost Institute, a nonpartisan healthcare data analytics organization, about 4% of the total $4.9T ($14,500/person) the U.S. spends annually on healthcare is spent on primary care. This is ass-backwards. As Ben Franklin said more politely, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” But perhaps in the healthcare business of today, prevention isn’t as profitable as curing what we allow to advance into full-blown disease?

It’s important to note that the tools of local primary care include not only the local healthcare professionals such as primary care docs, P.A.s, R.N.s, school nurses, dentists, audiologists, optometrists, mental-health and addiction counselors, but also the broader resources such as: local age-well committees, psychotherapy groups, trauma counselors, physical-therapy centers, local gyms, chronic-disease management and addiction-recovery groups. A community deeply invested in primary care also includes social-adhesion groups like elderly meet-up groups or coffee-hours at some of our 185 local libraries, community suppers, meals-on-wheels and local-food shelves, local walk-talk-and-lunch clubs, dances, concerts and local theater companies.

Hopefully we might someday organize and enlist local delivery folks like post-office workers or police officers to knock on doors periodically to see if anyone needs help or just give an indication that someone cares about them. Good neighbors already do this.

Vermont Association of Area Agencies on Aging, coordinates the work of five Vermont councils on aging: Age Well in Chittenden, Addison, Franklin and Grand Isle counties, Southwestern Vermont Council on Aging in Bennington and Rutland counties, Northeast Kingdom Council on Aging, serving Caledonia, Essex and Orleans counties, Central Vermont Council on Aging serving Lamoille, Orange and Washington counties, and Senior Solutions serving Windham and Windsor counties. Their mission fills a gap in conventional ideas of primary care: “To empower and support individuals as they age by providing community connection and access to services.”

Another example in Middlebury is the Otter Creek Child Center which “supports young children and families in achieving their goals by providing high quality early care and education.” This is primary care in the best sense.

The Sharon Health Initiative (SHI) is another example of a Vermont community working to connect every member of their community with a local healthcare provider. They’re also advocating in the Legislature for the creation of a “healthcare extension agent” for each town in Vermont, drawing on Vermont’s agricultural tradition of extension agents providing Vermont farmers with connections and educational resources. Essentially, the position mandated for every town focuses on home-visits, teaching, coaching, coordination and integration of services as well as prevention of disease and promotion of health for individuals and the community at large.

House bill H 185, introduced last year, proposes that the Green Mountain Care Board (GMCB) develop and implement a universal primary care program in Vermont by January 1, 2028. As expected and necessary, the bill focuses on funding, implementation, and oversight. But Vermonters will have to look beyond the “business” of healthcare and focus on how we achieve a community culture of “population health.” The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) defines “population health” as “working to protect and improve the health of communities through policy recommendations, health education and outreach, and research for disease detection and injury prevention. It can be defined as what “we as a society do collectively to assure the conditions in which people can be healthy,” also providing “an opportunity for health care systems, agencies and organizations to work together in order to improve the health outcomes of the communities they serve.”

We must bring our townsfolk together to discuss how to achieve primary care in its broadest and most effective sense…understanding and implementing it in the larger cultural context of how we keep our shrinking communities connected and healthy. We know it’s about more than just doctors and hospitals.

n Bill Schubart

· Public Education: private vs. constitutionally-mandated public schooling, mandatory civics curriculum, testing, childcare, life-long learning.

· Shelter: housing, homelessness, co-housing

· Food systems: industrial vs. regenerative local agriculture, distribution systems, nutrition education

· Transportation: public (van, bus, rail, air) vs. private (car, personal jets)

· Environmental degradation: soils, waterways, air quality, chemical and fossil fuel regulation.

· Healthcare physiological/mental, nonprofit (mission) or business (profit), primary care or hospital care, community nurses and care coordinators, trauma counseling.

· Criminal Justice: policing, the court system, restorative justice, corrections, diversion, education, healthcare, and reentry counseling.

· State-government efficacy (executive, legislative and judicial); leadership, lawmaking, judicial function, nonprofit-governance engagement

I’ve organized my New Year’s wish list along these lines and will share my hopes for each in the New Year.

Public education:

a. We will not use our constitutionally-mandated public-education system to fund private, religious, or home schooling.

b. Discard the costly labels of school hierarchy (pre-K, nursery, kindergarten, grade school, junior high, high, college, post grad etc.) and recast public education as a continuum of life-long learning, beginning at six months, after a paid family leave for parents. “Day-care providers” would become early-essential-education professionals and learning would begin at six months, a critical period in child development.

c. School location will be a function of the student’s age. In a child’s first twelve years, they will be schooled close to home in their communities, utilizing our many community schools which are a source of community adhesion. From twelve on they may continue in regional district schools. In college and post-grad… as far away from home as possible.

d. The job of parents is to nurture and raise independent, resilient young people to carry democracy forward, not to create dependency.

Housing:

a. As precursor to mental and physical health and to the criminal justice system, government plays role in supporting, regulating, and co-funding commercial housing markets. If left to function solely as a business -- like healthcare -- it will only maximize profits. Contrary to popular opinion, “market need” is not always a driver of beneficial investment. Private equity is buying up countless rental units and vacancies as long-term investments.

b. We will regulate housing development based on expressed consumer needs. Most young people no longer believe they will ever be able to afford to own a home and, if asked, many are comfortable with co-housing, so perhaps a cluster of 800-square-foot living units with shared amenities like a gym, library, communal kitchen and guest rooms. Elderly co-housing is increasingly popular in the U.S. and in Europe. We will ask different socio-economic groups how they choose to live.

c. Environmental factors being critical, we will take into account the natural environment and preclude construction in flood plains, wildlife migration routes, and prime agricultural areas. The UVM Leahy Center has pioneered research on optimizing housing construction locations in Vermont based on riparian systems.

Food systems:

a. Quality: we know that seasonal, regenerative farmsteads will produce better quality food without pesticides than large industrial operations.

b. Seasonality and distribution: we know that fruits and vegetables are seasonal and that providing year-round availability adds costs and requires fossil fuels for transport.

c. Nutrition and health: We know that good nutrition is a function of grown food rather than ultraprocessed foods produced by industrial giants. Nutrition education must be taught in our schools.

Transportation:

a. As a rural state, Vermonters rely on cars to travel. EVs and hybrids are slowly replacing fossil-fueled cars. Of Vermont’s 420,000 passenger cars, almost 25,000 (6%) are EVs or hybrids. We will encourage more.

b. Continue public and private investment in public transportation. Intercity vans and buses reduce regular commutation traffic, as do work-from-home options and shorter in-office workweeks.

c. Along our existing rail routes, we will introduce single-car, self-driving rail service. Sadly, we tore up an extensive rail network that existed in the first half of the 20th century when everyone bought cars… a giant leap backwards.

d. We will charge $2,000 landing and take-off fees at our major airports for private jets.

e. Further facilitate and expand ride-sharing options.

The Environment:

a. We will absolutely ban glyphosate (RoundUp), atrazine, chlorpyrifos, dicamba, paraquat, and all dangerous herbicides and pesticides known causes of Parkinson’s, cancer, and other diseases.

b. Add the cost of all plastic packaging to consumer products and groceries and seek truly-recyclable alternatives.

c. Recycle all tires, which when buried are a major source of microplastics.

d. End agricultural subsidies for industrial farms.

e. Expand low-income assistance for super-insulating homes and converting from fossil-fuel heat to heat pump, and electric and other renewable forms of heating and cooling.

f. Expand the boundaries between manure or artificial fertilizer spread near riverine drainage areas.

Healthcare:

a. We will hold nonprofit hospital boards legally accountable for their success or failure to deliver on population health. Nonprofits are legally accountable for mission and fiscal sustainability but not for profit and growth. “Population health,” the defined mission for nonprofit healthcare, is defined as quality, access and affordability.

b. Primary care is 6.5% of total healthcare cost. We will ensure that it becomes at least three times that. We will move healthcare investments upstream to community-based primary care facilities where it is much more cost-efficient as are all preventive measures. We will implement Town Health Coordinators.

c. Expand access to mental-health and addiction support services such as those provided by Howard Center and Brattleboro Retreat. It’s not enough for the Vermont legislature to name them as “designated providers” and then not fund them adequately.

d. Expand trauma-informed counselling in community primary-care centers to mitigate the downstream expense of treating adverse childhood experiences.

e. Support the regulatory and guidance efforts of the Vermont Legislature, the Green Mountain Care Board (GMCB), the VT Dept. of Health (DOH), and Vermont Healthcare 911 (of which I am a board member).

Criminal Justice:

a. Vermont’s prison population is 1650 as of November 2025, of which some 650 are detainees awaiting trial. With too few competent judges, the Vermont judicial system is inadequate to handle current arraignments. We add more competent judges. A third of Vermont judges have retired since the end of the pandemic.

b. For nonviolent crimes and crimes of property we will expand community-based restorative justice resources, court diversion, corrections education and reentry counseling programs.

c. Support the effectiveness of our police by supplementing their interdiction teams with mental health and addiction professionals.

d. Finally we acknowledge that our upstream socio-economic failures can be measured in our emergency rooms and in our prison cells.

State government:

a. Executive branch: Elect those who understand leadership as service beyond the accumulation of power and authority… those who manage current crises, but also foresee and forestall emerging crises such as those outlined above.

b. Legislative branch: Redesign to better harvest the civic commitment of those serving. A smaller unicameral legislature will allow expenses to shift from process costs to support systems. Merge and expand Legislative Counsel and Joint Fiscal into a single research and legislative drafting body and expand it to include diverse Vermont thinkers serving in an honorary capacity who can propose solutions.

c. Expand and diversify the judiciary to manage the current caseload in a timely manner, bearing in mind the constitutional right of citizens to a “speedy trial by their peers.”

Finally, I would underline that all “beats” are interdependent. Lack of education, food, or housing impact healthcare and criminal justice. We must all work on all these issues together, and it will take real leadership at all levels to do so. The Vermont we want and can afford is within our grasp if we are bold enough to make change.

n Bill Schubart

Meanwhile:

· Vermont property taxes are projected to rise by 12%.

· In most urban areas, too many Vermonters can’t afford housing.

· Vermonters experience the highest healthcare-insurance costs in the nation.

· The average U.S. cost of a college degree in the U.S. is $38,270 per year.

· The MIT Livable Wage Index for Burlington, VT, for a family with two working adults and two children is $40.48 an hour or $162,578 required annual pretax income. And Vermont’s minimum wage in 2025 is $14.01, and the federal minimum wage is $7.25.

· A Wall Street portfolio manager, Michael Green, observed recently that $140,000 a year should be the new poverty line.

As Christ said in Matthew 26:11 “The poor you will always have with you.” But His words don’t alleviate our responsibility as citizens to choose leaders who will manage an economy that minimizes poverty, shares resources, regulates greed, and taxes income and assets with a goal of equalizing economic opportunity.

Vermonters take pride in our food and wood banks, our clothing drives, our home-share programs, our temporary shelters, all beacons of our charity. But they’re also billboards of our economic failures. Like the sidewalk addiction detritus and tarp-and-tent clusters, they remind us of our socio-economic failure to support and sustain a middle class – a fundamental element of any democracy.

We might take a lesson from what we’re learning in healthcare. We know that community-based primary care is more accessible, less expensive, and more effective than care provided in an emergency department. Primary care has traditionally been the point of entry when one has nonspecific symptoms or becomes ill, as opposed to the emergency department, the portal for major traumatic injuries or life-threatening symptoms.

The mission of primary care is education, prevention, diagnosis and chronic-disease management. Treatment for non-life-threatening conditions such as trauma-counseling (for adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), mental-health counseling, addiction-support services, ageing well, and preventive dental care have been shown to be best managed at the local level in a more cost-efficient community setting where access and affordability are paramount. An effective community-based primary care network reduces emergency department admissions where untreated conditions have advanced into more urgent and expensive treatment protocols. Currently primary-care spending is a mere 6.5% of our total annual healthcare expense of $4.9T. Moving our healthcare investments upstream to lower total urgent cost is critical to lowering our overall healthcare costs.

Likewise, were we to take a similar approach, by using economic tools like regulation and taxation to drive and sustain an equitable economy, it would be considerably more cost-efficient than trying to mitigate the human cost and pain of accelerating poverty, mental illness, and addiction.

In these times of massive wealth concentration, it’s often said that philanthropy can do a better job than government, but this is not borne out by the numbers. The Chronicle of Philanthropy is clear that private and foundation donations can never fill the intrinsic obligation of government to ensure the wellbeing of its citizens. Also, philanthropy runs the inherent risk of exerting non-altruistic influence over nonprofit mission.

Another example: Just as urgent care is considerably more expensive than preventive primary care, the cost to jail one Vermonter for a year is $57,615. For various reasons, which have less to do with rising crime than with a broken judicial system, our prison population has increased by 24% in the last four years. With a current population of 1628, the 2025 budget was $197,457,491. What would $200M do in the way of prevention -- $121,288 per incarceree?

As a friend half-heartedly suggested, couldn’t we just paid convicts and detainees $50,000 a year to stay out of trouble and find purpose in our society? Along similar lines, I asked an earlier Commissioner of Corrections how many of the then-175 female inmates in the Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility (CRCF) in South Burlington does the public need to be protected from due to a history of violence. His answer was twelve.

Vermont is making progress at reinvesting expenses in helping incarcerated people prepare for a life after prison. There’s also a phenomenon in corrections literature called “criminal menopause.” The term refers, in part, to the fact that among all males paroled after 48 years of age, statistically under two percent will reoffend. Could this alter how we sentence?

When will we learn that investing upstream in prevention, education, and child care is more cost-effective for society and in healthcare than is the staggering cost of remediation at the crisis level?

Perhaps we need to redesign our system of taxation in Vermont and nationally. Some 15 years ago, I co-chaired the Legislative Blue Ribbon Tax Commission. Our charge was to design and suggest a better tax structure for Vermont. We did so and a few of our recommendations were implemented on a largely as-needed basis, but our overall recommendations were never implemented. We did a deep dive on income, sales, services, and asset taxation. I mention this only to say that, having spent three years looking in great detail at our tax code with a team of brilliant and politically diverse co-chairs and aides, I do have some understanding of how it works.

Fifteen years later, I would argue that we need to reverse-engineer our current Vermont and national tax codes with the goal of sustaining an equal-opportunity society. That would mean moving our tax investments upstream to fund prevention, education, and early intervention.

We must also put strict legal and ethical limits on the technocrats investing heavily in state and Congressional lobbying efforts to fend off regulation and taxation to ensure their freedom to profiteer from their innovations at the expense of society.

One key effort where preventive action is needed: social media is an addictive cesspool of social influencers selling lifestyle products, suicide instruction, pedophilia grooming, political divisiveness, and whatever else generates attention, clicks, and sales. And now we have an unwitting explosion of artificial intelligence (AI) which generates fantasy worlds that further distance us from reality. To prevent any regulation, President Trump recently signed an executive order denying states’ rights to regulate AI in any way.

So, why don’t we offset this gathering storm of expanding poverty, soaring healthcare costs, inadequate housing, mental-health crises among disaffected young people, loneliness, and untreated addiction by making the upfront investments that we know will pay off in lower costs down the road?

Isn’t this reinvestment of our resources a better path to lowering taxes for all than simply lowering taxes for the vastly wealthy and leaving the remaining tax burden on a shrinking middle class?

-

Bill Schubart

Although deeply religious, Grammie bore no judgments. We could count on her unqualified love and understanding. She forbore any comment about my departure from the Catholic Church at 18, my three marriages, and she was always there for my children and former wives.

For much of her life, our mother battled depression and would retire to her bedroom for days at a time. Grammie would “drop by” with a casserole and spend a bit of time tidying up in Mom’s absence. Her signature dish and our childhood favorite we called “Cheez-Whiz Broccoli.” It could be prepared in a flash by stirring together a box of Minute Rice, a jar of Cheez-Whiz, and a bag of frozen broccoli florets. (Combine all ingredients in a casserole dish, stir gently, and bake for 20 minutes at 350.)

The ‘50s and ‘60s began the market decline of fresh food and the birth of the industrial food age. TV advertising convinced us that frozen and canned vegetables were superior to the fresh produce available locally. Spam, Velveeta, Junket, Cap’n Crunch cereal, and Tang became staples as did “Bunny Bread” and oleomargarine, the white bars of which came with a small bladder of reddish dye to be blended in to make it look like butter, even though it never tasted like butter.

I remember going into Patch’s Market with a grocery list from Dad. “Half a pound of cheese, sir,” I intoned to Mr. Patch. “White or yellow?” he answered, even as a large wheel of Vermont cheddar sat atop the meat case under a glass cloche.

On the first Sunday of each month after ten o’clock Mass at Holy Family Church in Morrisville, we’d gather around Grammie’s dining room table for Sunday dinner. It was an enduring ritual until one Sunday, sporting a blue-black bruise around her left eye, Grammie announced she could no longer live alone and charged dad with finding her a retirement home.

For a decade leading up to her moving out of her apartment, we’d parade into her house dressed in our church finery and encounter the smell of her signature pork roast sizzling in her new electric oven. Her large farm table displayed her best porcelain china and starched linens. The protocols of serving and consuming Sunday dinner matched those that my brother Mike and I, both altar boys, were familiar with serving mass, all very formal.

Dad would process in from the kitchen, bearing the large ironstone platter of charred pork and mint jelly. Grammie had grown up with a fear of trichinosis, so pork was routinely charred to ensure the elimination of any parasites. Grammie would bring in a smaller platter of roast potatoes and one of us kids would bring the bowl of canned green beans and another the saucer of bread and the butter dish.

Dad would slice the pork and Grammie would serve the potatoes and beans, passing to each of us a full plate. Still a toddler, our sister Claire would sneak a small slab of butter and slip it in her mouth like fudge.

This Sunday dinner tradition continued for almost two decades.

One year, when Mike and I were in our teens, Mike asked Grammie if she ever made green salad.

“No,” she answered abruptly. “I ’ave a ’iatal ’ernia and dem leaves gets caught in my t’roat.” That ended the salad conversation.

The following month, the family trouped in for Sunday dinner expecting the regular menu. But then to our surprise, Grammie returned to the kitchen and came out bearing a dinner plate featuring a quivering dome of green Jell-O in which were suspended canned mandarin orange sections, miniature marshmallows, walnuts, and multi-colored M and M’s.

“You like da green salad, so I made one. Mangez-bien!”

We all just stared at the green quivering mass.

—Bill Schubart

This season, let’s limit our spending to those who need help and buying the few necessary gifts only from local resources that recirculate our dollars in the local economy. For those with limited travel capacity, local platforms like Myti enable online purchases and home deliveries, but only from local crafts, farms, and businesses.

The American economy is driven by consumers. Consumption is 70% of our gross domestic product (GDP)… the sum of all our output in products and services.

At the same time, our democratic form of government is at grave risk. The “pollutocrats” have decided that democracy no longer serves their needs, and so, invest heavily in our elected representatives in Congress, lobbying (bribing?) them to reduce regulation and taxation that might enable a working-class renaissance… fundamental to any democracy. As part of this effort, the current administration and their billionaire-colleagues are working to rig established voting mechanisms to ensure their own survival. So, we consumers can and must exercise our one undiminished right, the right to buy and further enrich the ownership-class.

Last Friday was “Black Friday,” supposedly the busiest shopping day of the year. Manufacturers and merchants vie for our shopping dollars or credit-card purchases, offering come-on bargains to gain foot traffic in their outlets. Reportedly, this year will be the first year where holiday consumer spending exceeds a trillion dollars. If we cut our consumer spending by half, what would a $500B nosedive say to the captains of retail? If making our voices heard by voting our preferences is under threat, we can still vote with our wallets.

This season, let’s send the message and boycott the mass market plutocrats who control the international consumption supply chain: Amazon, Target, Apple, Home Depot, Walmart, each of whom has their finger in the Trump administration’s pie.

Amazon founder; Target and Walmart eliminated their equal opportunity regulations (DEI) to defer to a Trump mandate. Apple’s Tim Cook pledged a commitment to help fund Trump’s $300M gold ballroom where the East Wing once stood. Home Depot allowed ICE agents to stage raids in their parking lots.

Meanwhile, as of December 2024, 771,480 Americans were homeless. Between 2023 and 2024, 39 percent more people in families with children experienced homelessness. Overall, the number of people experiencing homelessness has increased by 18 percent over the same period.

In September, Trump’s U.S. Dept. of Agriculture (USDA) cancelled the annual food insecurity report. But other reliable resources agree that about one in seven U.S. households experience food insecurity, some 47 million Americans including children. According the Vermont Dept. of Health (VDOH), some 40% of Vermonters experience hunger every day, one in seven of whom are children; that’s 260,000 neighbors, seniors, and kids.

Our relentless consumption has created the eddies of packaging waste in the Pacific Ocean between California and Hawaii dubbed The Great Pacific Garbage Patch that when last measured contained some 80 thousand tons of our plastic waste covering an area about twice the size of Texas. It’s made up of the discarded products, packaging, and shipping containers we consume in greater and greater quantities. And it’s just one of many.

As such, when we buy a product from Amazon or another online retailer we must ask:

• Was the product made by someone who earned a fair wage?

• Does the packaging contain more waste material than the product itself, since the object and its packaging will have to be repacked in cardboard and Styrofoam or bubble-wrap to survive shipment, creating more waste?

• Can you buy the same product locally since E-commerce shipments travel by air or sea freight if made overseas; by truck to the wholesale warehouse, then delivered to our homes, all burning fossil fuels?

• Since the money we paid for the object, its wasteful packaging, and the fuel to get it delivered all leaves our local economy and further degrades the climate, could you have bought it from a local producer?

To those to whom we want to give gifts this holiday, let’s buy from local producers and to consider giving consumables instead of knickknacks – toothpaste, soap, carwash coupons, canned goods, gift certificates, toilet paper, cordwood and more.

Psychologists agree there are five basic ways of giving and receiving love: words of affirmation, quality time, giving and receiving personally important gifts, acts of service, and physical touch. Not everyone communicates love in the same way and people have different ways they prefer to offer and receive love. Giving and receiving gifts is but one of the ways.

Perhaps during this holiday season, in deference to the colossal load of waste that Christmas giving adds to our environment, we might consider these other ways of expressing our love for one another.

Words of affirmation — writing personal letters and cards or phoning loved ones to express our affection.

Quality time — visiting and spending time with a person in need of company. For many, the season amplifies their sense of loneliness, and a visit lifts spirits.

Acts of service — volunteering to work at a food shelf, shelter, or community kitchen program is one and there’s a venerable tradition of giving charitable gifts in a friend or family member’s name.

Physical touch — we all have our physical boundaries and it’s important to be sensitive to and respect each other’s. But for many, a hug is one of the strongest expressions of love. For others, it might be a kiss and for others simply a handshake. Loving touch remains a vital expression of affection.

If, as in many families, everyone has a surfeit of stuff, donate money on their behalf to food banks and pantries, shelters, open clinics, and nonprofit educational and vocational resources.

I’ve long dreaded the onset of Christmas. As I’ve written earlier, my only real holiday is Thanksgiving, which is about gratitude for what and for whom we already have in our lives rather than acquiring more things.

We can rein in the Christmas chaos and send a message to our would-be leaders.

Happy Holidays

- Bill Schubart