Search Results for: Deusen

Vermont Interview with American YPG Volunteer Concerning the Revolution in Rojava (Syria)

Waterbury Vermont, February, 2019 – Michael Alexander, a guest of the Green Mountain Central Labor Council AFL-CIO, recently spoke to Equal Time Radio (WDEV 550AM) about his experience serving as a volunteer soldier in the YPG. The YPG & YPJ are the military arm of the revolution in the northern Syria.  The revolution, which is ideologically influenced by the writings of the Vermont philosopher Murray Bookchin, is seeking to establish a secular Town Meeting-like direct democracy in Rojava (Syria).  Alexander, a native of Ohio USA, served as a heavy machine gunner on the Raqqa front. 

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VT AFL-CIO Welcomes YPG Vet, Holds Political Convention

Over this past weekend [1/26/19], the Vermont AFL-CIO held its annual COPE Convention at the Old Socialist Labor Hall in the granite City of Barre. The day was spent strategizing Labor’s approaches to seeing a $15 an hour livable wage, paid family medical leave, and card check recognition becoming Vermont law in 2019. By passing card check recognition (S36), anytime a majority of public sector workers in a single shop sign Union cards, they would immediately be recognized as a Union without having to go through a drawn out and bureaucratic Labor Board election process (a process that provides anti-Union employers an unfair advantage and time to use scare tactics against employees). Passing card check in Vermont is a concrete way that Labor can begin to go back on the offensive here in the Green Mountains.

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Trump’s Betrayal of YPG – Paris Commune Falls Again?

As an American, as a Vermonter, and as a Labor leader I have marched many times against US lead wars.  However, I do not oppose wars and US military action because I assert war as always unjust and always unnecessary.  I am not philosophically a Kantian; this is not a moral imperative for me.  I am also no liberal.  If truth be told it was only through war and armed conflict that Vermont and the United States became republics free from the British Empire.

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Justice For Plow Drivers

UNION ACTION ALERT: Castleton DPW workers with AFSCME Local 1201 of the AFL-CIO (those that plow the roads and operate the wastewater plant) have been without a contract or raises for over two years.  While these Union members continue to fight for justice, we need to let the Castleton Select Board know THIS IS NOT OK and Local 1201 does not stand alone (and that Vermonters from all over the state stand with them).  Please contact the Castleton Select Board today and leave a message for Selectman Jim Leamy.  Tell Jim: “Jim Leamy, I am a working Vermonter too, and I stand with DPW Union employees.  Fair contract now!”

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Gun Culture and The Left

“Laws never made men a wit more just.” –Henry David Thoreau

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Spaceman: Of Roadkill & Governors

Bill Lee Seeks To Be Labor’s Anti-Candidate In 2016 Vermont Governors’ Race

By Dave Van Deusen*

Montpelier, Vermont, 8/23/16- Anyone who grew up in New England or Quebec in the 1970s, any baseball fan really, knows tales of the Spaceman. Pitching for the Boston Red Sox from 1969-1978 and the Montreal Expos from 1979-1982, yarns of Bill sprinkling “marijuana dust” on his pancakes to help him cope with big city bus fumes abound. We Vermonters know him as an adoptive (and eccentric) favorite son, involving himself politically in support of single payer healthcare and endorsing Anthony Pollina’s own 2008 run for governor. Now the Spaceman is running for Governor in his own right; as the candidate of the Vermont Liberty Union Party.

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Ali: The Peoples’ Champ Is Gone

“He who is not courageous enough to take risks will accomplish nothing in life.”
-Mohamad Ali

Very sad weekend… We have lost the Greatest Of All-Time: Mohamed Ali.

Such a brave brave man in and out of the ring. He conquered Liston (twice), Frazier (two out of three), and Foreman. And we never even saw him fight in his prime… In those years he was barred from boxing and had his passport taken away for his refusal to fight in the unjust Vietnam War (a stance he took out of principle alone; if he did allow himself to be drafted, he would have had a cake walk of PR appearances and exhibition matches). It short he was a true Peoples’ Champ; one who stood up for the underdog, the working man, against imperialism, and for Black Liberation.

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Dave Zuckerman: No Fortunate Son

Fellow Working Vermonters,

I am a former District Vice President and Member-At-Large of the Vermont AFL-CIO (UAW Local 1981). As such, I know there is only one candidate for Lieutenant Governor who has the backs of working class Vermonters; State Senator David Zuckerman. Dave has walked picket lines with me. He, like Bernie Sanders, has fought like hell (against the Democratic & Republican establishment) for livable wages, healthcare for all, and for the rights of union & non-union workers.

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The Rise and Fall of The Green Mountain Anarchist Collective

“The chains of authoritarianism and capitalism can only be shattered when they are broken at many links. Vermont is our home, and it serves as the one link that we can access, but it is only one. Any victory here would only be partial. Deliverance to the Promised Land will only come when many more than us rise up against that which holds the multitude in bondage.”

-The Green Mountain Anarchist Collective,
From Neither Washington Nor Stowe

Montpelier, Vermont -Established in 2000, in a cooperative household located at the termination of a wooded dirt road in Southern Vermont, the Green Mountain Anarchist Collective (GMAC), for a time, did its part in carrying forth Vermont’s long tradition of radical, leftist politics. Founded in Windham County by Natasha Voline, Johnny Midnight, Xavier Massot, and (myself) David Van Deusen, the collective was birthed with strong Situationist, leftist, and militant inclinations. The original GMAC nucleus lived together (along with comrades Imelda R, Bridget M, and Ted K), and operated as a kind of outlaw community, connected to the broader area counter culture based in and around Brattleboro.

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VT 2014 Election Analysis From The Fringe

Progressives Make Gains Respectable Showing For Liberty Union Socialists;
Radical-Capitalist Libertarians Fall Flat, By David Van Deusen

Thus far, one of the more interesting aspects of the 2014 Vermont election was the relative strength of the Progressive Party & and the respectable showings of the Vermont Liberty Union Party. The Democratic Party, in a year that saw record low turnout (43.7%), had a net loss of eleven in the VT House, and two in the VT Senate (and a surprisingly close contest for Governor). Even so, and even with voting patterns seemingly favoring the right, the Democrats retained a commanding lead in both the VT House and VT Senate. And while the Republicans made some gains (small in the big political scheme of things) the further left also did better than traditional election logic would seem to allow for.

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Paid Sick Days are a Vermont Value

By David Van Deusen*

We, in each of our towns, and throughout Vermont are, together, a community. As Town Meeting approaches, I trust that all of us, regardless of your particular political persuasion, agree. And as a community we do well to agree that one does well, when one’s neighbor does well. This commitment to our friends, family, and fellow residents is old one. When the Green Mountain Boys evicted New York land surveyors, tax collectors, and sheriffs, I do not doubt that they too were motivated by this notion of self-preservation as inalienably linked to community; Freedom and Unity. More recently, we saw this belief manifest during the crisis following Irene. Such acts of human solidarity will never be forgotten. In essence Vermont has a long and proud history of people reaching out in solidarity when their neighbors could use a hand. We are, in a word, a people who embrace and honor the core value associated with the very notion of community as the foundation upon which rests the prosperity of the individual.

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