When Bernie Sanders decided to pursue national politics, one obstacle stood in his way: He had to defeat Vermont’s Republican congressman, Rep. Peter Smith. In 1988, Sanders first ran for Congress against Smith and lost in a three-way race. Two years later, Smith was completing his first term when the former mayor of Burlington challenged him again. This time, the maverick socialist won handily.

Peter Smith occupies a unique place in Vermont’s political history. He is the one-term Republican congressman who in defeat launched Sanders’ three-decade long national political career. And Smith is Vermont’s last Republican congressman.

Smith cites a saying that “if you wanna surf, you gotta get ahead of the wave. In politics, the wave broke right on top of me. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Smith has left the Republican Party and signed a letter in 2016 with other former Republican Congressmen denouncing Donald Trump as “manifestly unqualified to be president.”

Smith says he still occasionally participates in programs in which former members of Congress speak to students and citizen groups. He identifies himself as “R-Vermont in the 101st Congress.”  He says with a soft laugh that it is “a little confusing to some people because I’m generally to the left of whoever the Democrat is that I’m traveling with. The truth of matter is when I was in the Congress, I voted to the left of something like 55% of the Democratic Caucus.”

Peter Smith founded and led the Community College of Vermont in the 1970s and went on to serve as a state senator and Lieutenant Governor. After losing to Bernie Sanders in 1990, Smith left politics and Vermont to pursue a career in education. He was the founding president of California State University at Monterey Bay, was dean of the Graduate School of Education at George Washington University, Assistant Director of UNESCO, and is now a professor at the University of Maryland Global Campus. He has written a new book about people who did not attend college but who bring deep experiential knowledge to their work, Stories from the Educational Underground: The New Frontier for Learning and Work.

Smith says, “I couldn’t see it in 1991, but…I think I am doing what I was meant to do. I frankly think Bernie has been doing what he was meant to do. He’s had a major impact on the party and the country.”

As the Covid pandemic grabs headlines, another deadly epidemic is quietly ravaging communities: addiction has led to a record spike in overdoses. Nationally, there was a 29% increase in overdose deaths last year. In Vermont, opioid deaths rose by 38% in 2020, with 157 people who died by overdose.

For town librarian Brett Ann Stanciu, these statistics had a name and a face. In 2016, a local man who broke into her library in Woodbury, Vt., died by suicide after encountering a library trustee. This led Stanciu on a quest to understand opioid addiction in her community and in Vermont. It also led her to reckon with her own addiction. This quest is the subject of her new book, Unstitched: My Journey to Understand Opioid Addiction and How People and Communities Can Heal.

Stanciu, a graduate of Marlboro College and formerly the librarian in Woodbury, says that her book “looks at our society and how it’s frayed apart, what the ways [are] that we can put our society back together.”

In our second half, we talk with Maia Szalavitz, a New York Times bestselling author of Undoing Drugs: The Untold Story of Harm Reduction and the Future of Addiction. Szalavitz. When she was in her 20s, Szalavitz struggled with an addiction to heroin and cocaine. She says programs promoting abstinence from drugs have resulted in broken families, mass incarceration and the spread of disease. Szalavitz says a more effective -- but politically controversial -- approach is harm reduction. Examples of this include needle exchange programs and using methadone and buprenorphine to treat addiction.

Szalavitz says that harm reduction is now gaining acceptance—but for dubious reasons. “Our drug laws are racist. The only reason the drugs that are legal are legal and the drugs that are illegal are illegal is racism and anti-immigrant panic. …Now when we see the victims of the opioid problem as being white, suddenly being nicer to them is OK, so harm reduction gets massively adopted all over the place.”

Szalavitz advocates ending the failed war on drugs and de-stigmatizing substance abuse. “When you take away the elusiveness and the cops and robbers, it doesn’t actually make people want to stay addicted forever. It gives them space to make some change…. Overall the picture is extraordinarily positive.”

This week, the U.S. government narrowly averted shutting down. Now, a debt default crisis looms on the horizon. This brinksmanship has been driven by Senate Republicans, who threatened a shutdown and are blocking raising the debt limit as part of a strategy to undermine President Biden’s economic agenda. Unless an agreement is reached by Oct. 18, the U.S. will default on its debts for the first time in its history.

How did government become the enemy? The simple answer is that Ronald Reagan successfully ran for the presidency in 1980 by declaring, “Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.” 

President Reagan ultimately presided over three government shutdowns, the first time that shuttering the government was used as a political weapon. President Trump took this scorched earth political warfare to a new level, presiding over the longest government shutdown in history – 35 days — which occurred in January 2019 over disputes with Congress about funding his border wall. Trump’s shutdown cost American taxpayers about $5 billion.

According to Yale historian Paul Sabin, the anti-government movement that Reagan rode to victory was actually inspired by citizen activists of the 1960s, such as Ralph Nader and Rachel Carson. He describes this improbable connection between 1960s liberal activism and the current anti-government movement in his new book, Public Citizens: The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism. Sabin is a professor of history at Yale University and director of the Yale Environmental Humanities Program.

Sabin is deeply concerned by the authoritarian bent of the current anti-government movement. “We need to actively defend the government and its purposes and the public goods and the role of public institutions.”

“My dream would be we could find a way to… combine active government with the idea of continuous reform and improvement and we could come to terms with complicated, flawed institutions.”

“We’re never going to have a perfect government,” Sabin concludes.

It is the greatest fraud in Vermont’s history.

The EB-5 scandal has the elements of a true crime novel: A shady grifter. Secret meetings. Duped investors. Complicit regulators. A panicked whistleblower. A tenacious journalist. Whispers of blackmail. Millions of dollars lost. A dramatic raid by Federal agents that brings it all crashing down.

In 2012, when VTDigger founder and editor Anne Galloway attended a glitzy press conference announcing plans for massive investments and thousands of jobs in the financially depressed Northeast Kingdom, she smelled a rat. The latest revelations in the unfolding saga include a state attorney who alleged that top government officials knowingly “aided and abetted” the fraud.

In this Vermont Conversation, Galloway offers a primer on the EB-5 scandal, starting from the program’s beginnings in 2006 to the most recent developments. In 2017, Galloway was a finalist for the Ancil Payne Award for Ethics, the Al Neuharth Innovation in Investigative Journalism Award and the Investigative Reporters and Editors FOIA Award for her EB-5 investigation.

Galloway says that the EB-5 scandal is a cautionary tale in the small Green Mountain state. “We have a situation in Vermont in which we’re not very good about holding people accountable,” she says. “There are companies and entities that operate in this state with impunity because people in power aren’t willing to be subjected to the kind of scrutiny that would make their work more accountable to the public.”

Where will homeless Vermonters live?

That question has come to the forefront as more than 540 households were slated to lose their rooms in motels this week. Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020, Vermont’s general assistance housing program has utilized vacant motel rooms for Vermonters who would otherwise be homeless. VTDigger has reported that some 700 people were forced out of the program July 1, while people with children, or with disabilities, or who were fleeing dangerous or life-threatening conditions were allowed to remain. Vermont’s emergency motel stays were slated to end on September 23 – despite the fact that federal funds are available to cover the motel housing until the end of the year.

Vulnerable Vermonters have received a last-minute reprieve. On September 21, Gov. Phil Scott announced a “30-day pause” in the effort to close the motel housing program. His announcement came following criticism from legislators and advocates.

One such advocate is Addie Lentzner, a senior at Arlington High School. She helped organize a letter signed by dozens of owners of emergency hotels around the state that declared: “We as motel owners call on Governor Scott to use the federal money to reinstate the GA Motel Program through December, and ensure that there is safe and consistent housing available when the time comes to transition out. At this point, every available motel room should be used for shelter. Now is the time to act before almost 600 people are kicked out.” The letter pushes back on arguments by state officials that motel owners want voucher recipients gone to free up rooms for leaf-peeping tourists.

On this Vermont Conversation, we hear from people who are directly affected by the motel housing program, including Laila Lakshmair and her son, Raj Singh, who operate the Bradford Motel; Olive, a resident of a motel in Morrisville, who asked to be identified by her first name only to protect her privacy; Kim Anetsberger, executive director of Lamoille Community House, a seasonal homeless shelter; and advocate Addie Lentzner.

In the second half of the Vermont Conversation, we talk with longtime advocate for the homeless Rita Markley. For over two decades, Markley has led the Committee on Temporary Shelter (COTS), one of Vermont’s oldest shelters for people experiencing homelessness. Markley discusses how the homelessness crisis has deepened over the past 30 years as a result of policy choices and the closures of mental health facilities, and how policies must change for homelessness to be eradicated.

John Killacky has had a front row seat in America’s culture wars. As a gay man and a dancer in the 1980s, he lost over 100 friends to AIDS. As an arts administrator in the 1990s and 2000s, he confronted police who threatened to shut down artists who they deemed to be obscene. And as the former director of the Flynn Theater in Burlington, Vt., he agreed to allow a visit by presidential candidate Donald Trump in 2016 – and broke down in tears after a night filled with rage, vitriol and protest.

The Trump campaign overbooked the theater, causing overflow crowds to spill onto the streets and confront anti-Trump protesters. As protesters inside the Flynn disrupted his speech, Trump demanded of police, “Get ’em out. Confiscate his coat. It’s about 10 degrees below zero outside. … Tell him we’ll send it to him in a couple of weeks.”

Today Killacky is a Vermont State Representative representing South Burlington and is one of a handful of openly LGBTQ legislators. He has a new book of essays, Because Art.

Killacky was targeted by protesters for giving a platform to Trump in 2016. He remains unsettled by what he saw that night.

“I felt like I experienced fascism from the stage,” he says. He talks about whether he would make the same decision again.

The issue of resettling refugees has been a flashpoint in Rutland. Five years ago, then-Alderman David Allaire fiercely opposed the settlement of 100 Syrian refugees in the city, declaring that the program should be “slowed down, if not stopped.” His opposition to resettling refugees was a central issue in his campaign against Mayor Chris Louras. Six weeks after Donald Trump was inaugurated, Allaire soundly defeated Louras in March 2017 in a vote that was widely viewed as a referendum on refugee resettlement. The refugee controversy and Louras' defeat made national news.

Last week, something remarkable happened at a meeting of the Rutland Board of Aldermen. Now-Mayor David Allaire stood up to speak to the issue of a plan to resettle Afghan refugees in Rutland. Allaire declared, “I want to make clear to everyone that I am supportive of this...” Gov. Phil Scott has also expressed support for bringing refugees to Vermont.

Rutland Alderman Devon Neary noted the results of a recent census. “We lost 688 folks, so honestly, this couldn’t come at a better time,” he told Amila Merdzanovic, director of Vermont’s chapter of the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants. He encouraged Merdzanovic to look at Rutland as a “big partner, not just as a little partner.”

“For the Love of Rutland” is a new film by award-winning documentary filmmaker Jennifer Maytorena Taylor, who grew up in Rutland and is now an associate professor in Film and Digital Media and director of Graduate Studies in the Social Documentation MFA program at University of California at Santa Cruz. The film follows a Rutland woman who is struggling with overcoming poverty and addiction. The film also follows former Mayor Chris Louras during the bitter debate over refugees in 2016, and his electoral defeat.

Bill McKibben has a new target for his climate activism: his fellow Baby Boomers.

McKibben, the founder of the global climate action group 350.org and a bestselling author, announced last week that he will end his weekly “Climate Crisis” column in The New Yorker and instead launch his own Substack newsletter, The Crucial Years, and a new organization, ThirdAct.org. He tweeted: “We're going to try and organize 'experienced Americans' — i.e., people over 60 like me — around issues of climate justice, racial justice, economic justice.”

“Our generations have done their share of damage,” he writes. “We're on the verge of leaving the world a worse place than we found it. But we also have the skills and resources to help make change.”

McKibben also reflects on the perilous state of democracy and on the prospects for his beloved but snakebitten Boston Red Sox.

A Texas law that effectively bans abortions after the sixth week of pregnancy went into effect on September 1. The law signed by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, known as SB8, bans abortion before many people know they are pregnant. It took effect after the U.S. Supreme Court, flush with three Trump appointees, refused to grant an emergency request to block it. 

SB8 has a novel provision that essentially deputizes ordinary citizens to enforce the law and claim a $10,000 bounty on anyone that they think has violated it. The Texas abortion ban is now expected to be replicated in many other Republican-led states.

“It is an all-out attack on the people who need abortions by intimidating and terrifying every person around them who might help them,” asserts Lynn Paltrow, the founder and executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, a human rights and civil rights organization focused on pregnant and parenting women.

Paltrow, who is an attorney, tells The Vermont Conversation that the Texas law is “about much bigger issues: white supremacy and male supremacy. It isn’t just criminalizing abortion. It is labeling and surveilling everybody who has the capacity for pregnancy.”

The anti-abortion law took effect the same week that Gov. Abbott signed laws restricting voter access and loosened gun restrictions. Paltrow says all these laws are part of a “strategy of undermining democracy and undermining constitutional review by the Supreme Court.”

Stopping the Texas law is a critical test, she says. “It’s not only a fight for abortion rights. It’s a fight for a true democracy.”