Vermont

Trump DOJ Sues To Block States From Holding Fossil Fuel Companies Accountable For Climate Crisis

May 5, 2025 Cristen Hemingway Jaynes, EcoWatch. Educate! climate crisis, DOJ, Donald Trump, Hawaii, Lawsuits, Michigan, New York City (NYC), Oil Companies, Vermont

The United States Department of Justice (DOJ) on Wednesday filed lawsuits against Michigan and Hawaii over their planned legal actions against fossil fuel companies for the harm their greenhouse gas emissions caused by contributing to the climate crisis. The lawsuits — which are unprecedented, according to legal experts — claim there is a conflict between the state actions and federal government authority, as well as President Donald Trump’s energy agenda. The justice department is also suing Vermont and New York over their “climate superfund laws.” “These burdensome and ideologically motivated laws and lawsuits threaten American energy independence and our country’s economic and national security,” said U.S. Attorney General Pamela Bondi in a press release from the DOJ.

Federal Judge Orders Release Of Palestinian Student Mohsen Mahdawi

May 1, 2025 Michael Arria, Mondoweiss. Resist! Detention, ICE, Legal System, Mohsen Mahdawi, Vermont, Victory

Columbia University student Mohsen Mahdawi is free on bail after a federal judge in Vermont ordered his release. It’s the first order mandating the release of a student detained by the Trump administration. The New York Times called his release “a defeat” for the administration’s “widening crackdown against student protesters.” “The two weeks of detention so far demonstrate great harm to a person who has been charged with no crime,” said Judge Geoffrey Crawford at an April 30 hearing. “Mr. Mahdawi, I will order you released.” Crawford also compared Trump’s crackdown to the Red Scare and said that period of history wasn’t one that people should be proud of.

Trump’s Mass Deportation Operation Escalates With Workplace Raids

April 25, 2025 Natalia Marques, People's Dispatch. Educate! Donald Trump, Farm Workers, ICE, ICE Raids, Immigration, mass deportations, United States, Vermont, Worker Rights and Jobs

On Monday, April 21, US Customs and Border Protection raided Vermont’s largest dairy farm, detaining eight immigrant workers in the largest immigration raid in the state’s recent history. The next day, ten workers at a Home Depot in Pomona, California were arrested by immigration authorities. Workers across the country are bracing for the possibility that many of their coworkers may fall victim to sudden kidnappings by federal agents in the name of carrying out Trump’s agenda of mass deportations. In a country where undocumented workers perform many of the most essential functions in the nation’s economy, escalating immigration raids could have enormous ripple effects.

Vermont Towns Vote To Cut Ties With Israeli Apartheid

March 7, 2025 Michael Arria, Mondoweiss. Resist! BDS Movement, Democracy, Israel, Palestine, Palestine Solidarity, Vermont, Victory

On Tuesdays voters across the state of Vermont passed a number of non-binding resolutions declaring their towns and cities “apartheid-free communities.” The effort, organized by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), passed in Brattleboro, Winooski, Newfane, Plainfield, and Thetford. The question appeared on nine ballots on Town Meeting Day. Vermont is the first state in the country where municipalities have voted to cut economic ties with Israel. The pledge affirms a commitment to freedom, justice, and equality for the Palestinian people, opposes all forms of bigotry, and pledges toward ending “support to Israel’s Apartheid regime, settler colonialism, and military occupation.”

Vermont Faces Legal Challenge From Big Oil Over New Law

January 12, 2025 Alexandra Jacobo, Nation of Change. Educate! Big Oil, climate crisis, Climate Justice, Vermont

In a move that could set a precedent for climate accountability laws across the United States, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the American Petroleum Institute (API) have filed a lawsuit against the state of Vermont. The lawsuit challenges Vermont’s groundbreaking law that requires fossil fuel companies to pay for damages caused by climate change, which has increasingly devastated the state through extreme weather events. The law, passed in 2024, makes Vermont the first state in the nation to hold fossil fuel companies accountable for a share of the financial burden caused by climate change.

In Vermont, Where Almost Everyone Has Insurance, Many Can’t Get Care

November 8, 2024 Phil Galewitz, MedPage Today. Educate! Health Care, Health Insurance, Profiteers, Vermont

On a warm autumn morning, Roger Brown walked through a grove of towering trees whose sap fuels his maple syrup business. He was checking for damage after recent flooding. But these days, his workers' health worries him more than his trees'. The cost of Slopeside Syrup's employee health insurance premiums spiked 24% this year. Next year it will rise 14%. The jumps mean less money to pay workers, and expensive insurance coverage that doesn't ensure employees can get care, Brown said. "Vermont is seen as the most progressive state, so how is healthcare here so screwed up?"

Making Our Communities What They Need To Be

July 15, 2024 Steve Early, Resilience. Organize! Communities, Democracy, Infrastructure, Unions, Vermont, Water

The symbols of public-sector infrastructure are often associated with urban areas: major highways and subway systems, for instance; bridges and tunnels; large ports and airports; billions of gallons of fresh water to deliver and hundreds of tons of solid waste to cart away every day. Yet public works departments are no less important in rural areas, where municipal employees and their families, whether members of the National Education Association, the Firefighters union, or the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Workers (AFSCME), are dependent on the same community services they provide. In Middlebury, Vermont, the largest town in rural Addison County, 46-year-old Jeremy Rathbun is one of those public servants.

If The AFL-CIO Gets Away With A Vermont Purge, It Won’t Stop Here

June 27, 2024 Ellen Kaye, Katie Maurice, and Jeremy Rathbun, Labor Notes. Strategize! AFL-CIO, Democracy, Labor Movement, Vermont, Worker Rights and Jobs

Vermonters have a special relationship with direct participatory democracy. The first Tuesday of every March, in towns big and small, citizens gather in person to do the business of their community the old-fashioned way—face to face, one person, one vote. Everyone can have the floor to speak their opinion, from an elected officer to the worker who hauls the garbage. Everyone has the same rights. This type of governance is something that we in the Green Mountain State take seriously and hold dear to our hearts. And it is one of the founding principles of the United! slate of the Vermont State Labor Council.

Vermont Delegates Must Keep Voting Until Results Please AFL Headquarters?

June 5, 2024 Steve Early, Popular Resistance. Strategize! Democracy, Elections, Labor Movement, Vermont

In some unions, the traditional way of winning approval for a proposed contract with management, that’s not popular with the members, is to hold a series of votes on essentially the same “tentative agreement.” Rank-and-file militants urging a “No” vote get worn down and demoralized by the prolonged ratification process. By a narrow margin, their less engaged co-workers end up accepting a deal with few noticeable improvements. In the past, “making them vote until they get it right” often replaced rank-and-file mobilization, strike preparation, and collective action in too many unions. That’s why union reformers today try to build organizational capacity in all those areas.

How Reformers Doubled Vermont AFL-CIO Membership

May 23, 2024 Gordon Simmons, Labor Notes. Organize! AFL-CIO, Book Review, Labor Movement, Unions, Vermont, Worker Rights and Jobs

Transforming an existing union into a more democratic and member-run organization has often proven to be a daunting—though possible—task. The pressing need to revitalize organized labor in the U.S., however, depends on such movements. Beginning in 2017, a slate of reform-minded union activists won leadership offices in the Vermont state federation of labor, reinvigorating that organization. Within just a few years, the federation’s membership doubled. Insurgent Labor: The Vermont AFL-CIO, 2017-2023 is two-term president David Van Deusen’s participant-retelling of the emergence of the UNITED reform group.

Vermont Could Become First State To Make Emitters Pay For Climate Damages

May 10, 2024 Paige Bennett, EcoWatch. Create! Accountability, Big Oil, climate crisis, State legislature, Vermont

Vermont’s House of Representatives has passed S.259, a state bill aimed at collecting recovery costs for climate-related damages from the biggest emitters, such as fossil fuel companies. The bill, called the Climate Superfund Act, was introduced to create a Climate Superfund Cost Recovery Program, in which fossil fuel businesses would undergo an assessment to determine their share of costs for fossil fuel extraction or refinement actions that led to increased greenhouse gases and related costs in the state. As reported by NBC News, the agency would measure extreme weather linked to climate change in the state and the cost of damages from extreme weather events through attribution science.

The AFL-CIO Can Be Reformed, Locally And From The Bottom-Up!

February 15, 2024 Steve Early, Popular Resistance. Organize! AFL-CIO, Democracy, Labor Movement, Vermont

Changing the leadership, structure, or functioning of any U.S. labor organization is no easy task. Activists and experts have long argued about whether dysfunctional unions are best reformed from the top-down, bottom-up, or some mix of the two approaches. For the past 65 years, the main locus of union democracy and reform struggles in the U.S. has been local unions, which hold leadership elections every three years and are closest to the membership. Thousands of rank-and-file workers have campaigned for more militant unionism by running for and winning local office. Some have had the backing of national networks of like-minded dissidents, including Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) and Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD), a TDU-inspired reform caucus within the United Auto Workers.

Vermont’s New AFL-CIO President Is A Democratic Socialist, Labor Reformer

December 27, 2023 Steve Early, Portside. Organize! AFL-CIO, Democratic Party, Elections, Socialism, Vermont, Worker Rights and Jobs

Unlike some local and national unions, the AFL-CIO’s state and local bodies rarely hold contested leadership elections with opposing slates offering alternative strategies for reviving the labor movement. Yet in Vermont, there have been two such contests for the state federation in the last four years, both producing a mandate for change. In 2019, a group of local union officers and staff members created a reform slate called “Vermont AFL-CIO United!” Fourteen of its candidates got elected — taking all the top officer jobs and forming a majority on the state labor council’s executive board. Their goal was to revitalize a moribund organization through membership education, mobilization, and direct action, plus greater independence from the Democratic Party.

In A New Climate Reality, Community May Be A Farmer’s Greatest Resource

September 1, 2023 Ellyn Lapointe, Sierra Club. Organize! climate crisis, Cooperative, Farming, Food and Agriculture, Vermont

The 10th of July had been a typical day at work for Caroline Hauser until she received an urgent email from the Intervale Center and its farms. They were calling for volunteers. The Intervale Center, a nonprofit farming cooperative in Burlington, Vermont, was bracing for intense rains and flooding forecasted to hit in the next 24 hours. It needed all hands on deck to harvest everything they could before disaster struck. Hauser messaged her manager to say she needed the day off. Hauser has been a Burlington resident since 2015 and a regular volunteer at the Intervale Center since 2019. She and her husband are summer and winter CSA members—she estimates that 80 to 90 percent of their food comes directly from the Intervale’s seven organic farms.

Disaster Recovery Efforts Can Serve More Than One Goal

July 23, 2023 Elizabeth Sawin, Resilience. Create! Disaster Recovery, Natural Disasters, Urban Planning, Vermont

In the aftermath of last week’s floods, my home state of Vermont faces a daunting path to recovery. Flooding damaged homes and businesses. Roads and bridges washed out, and communities have been cut off from the rest of the state. Vermont has walked this path before, after Tropical Storm Irene, and we are not alone in facing a recovery now. As the climate crisis deepens, more places will be spending more time in recovery mode. Recovery isn’t just a difficult task. It’s also one with lasting consequences. Rebuilt infrastructure will — hopefully — stand for decades to come. Over its lifetime, it will influence climate resilience, carbon emissions, health, well-being and social equity.

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