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Vermont cell phone and Internet access
Editor of the Reformer:
I love my home in Vermont, and though I am only three miles from downtown Brattleboro, on a paved road, I cannot get consistent internet access for my business on Guilford Street. Though I have about seven part-time people, I have to have employees who are not in Vermont, because the Internet service is so erratic or non-existent. I am sitting at a bagel shop, with music blasting, people walking in and out because there is no Internet service at my office today.
I have filed complaints with the state of Vermont, Senator Sanders, and with my non-service provider Fairpoint. The technicians have been clear, "Though you are on a main road, the cable you have is 30 years old and designed for telephones, not Internet."
Now in the Bagel shop in downtown Brattleboro, I cannot talk to my office, because the AT&T service in Vermont only works about 40 percent of the time.
Vermont in one survey was listed as "47th in terms of business friendliness." That may or may not be accurate, but for years I have been trying to get consistent Internet, but to no avail. First we had Sovernet and now Fairpoint, and I think the only choice may be to go back to the dreadfully slow satellite or realize that it is impossible to work in Vermont.
When will the state of Vermont and service providers wake up to the fact we are in a high speed internet age, and if
T. Namaya,
Brattleboro, Sept. 2 Supreme Court: Infallible or out of touch?
Editor of the Reformer:
Is the Supreme Court, like the pope, infallible? Like the pope, the justices are appointed for life. If a bad and dangerous decision is handed down, we are stuck with it unless it is subsequently overturned. Considering the history of corporate personhood encroachment since before the Lincoln administration, it seems unlikely that "we the people" will ever be the same again. Moreover, the recent high court decision means that "political speech does not lose First Amendment protection simply because its source is a corporation."
In the Citizens United decision where corporations are deemed "persons" and corporate money is deemed "free speech" the harm to real citizens who are real people is beyond measure.
So, what is personhood? Well, first, you had a person who was a person. And, that person became persons. Then, they in turn made a particular godhead a person. Not satisfied with that, they then made profit-making corporations a person. So, ah, who (or what) wants to be a person next?
Apparently, according to dictionaries, the word person is legally defined in different ways: 1.) The state, quality or period of being a person or individual human with rights; 2.) Used in legal, literary and/or formal contexts to refer to an unspecified individual; 3.) One of the three modes of being in the Trinitarian Godhead as understood by Christians; 4.) A partnership or corporation that is recognized by law because it is subject to rights and duties.
The notion that corporations are entitled to be and legally defined as a single "person" because they are subjected under the law to certain "rights and duties," is a form of legislative and legal insanity.
If, the only way a corporation can follow the law is to be defined as having the same rights and privileges of a human being, then the corporation should not be entitled by the law to be a corporation. Corporations should stand on their own two feet, and not presume to walk off with ours.
No wonder humans are such a mess. Nevertheless, a real person can’t help but conclude that the five Supreme Court justices who voted to uphold legalized corporate personhood should be suspended immediately pending further psychological evaluations.
If it’s true that there are Supreme Court justices unaware of who a person really is, they should not be sitting on the highest bench. Maybe it’s time for real citizens to find a way to enact a removal scenario of a justice for good cause.
Vidda Crochetta,
Brattleboro, Sept. 3
Reading between the lines
Editor of the Reformer:
In 2010, Haaretz quoted Benjamin Netanyahu’s brother-in-law, Dr. Hagai Ben Artzi, as saying: "We are a nation dating back 4,000 years, and you [America] in a year or two will be long forgotten."
In an interview with The Nation (3/8/12), Israeli novelist David Grossman confirmed that Netanyahu holds the identical view.
In February, Rabbi Moshe Wolfson of Brooklyn warned about the coming war: "...the government [in Israel] says that they will attack Iran first, before they could get the nuclear bomb. If that happens, everyone knows that that will cause a world war."
In 2010, the Rabbinical Council of Judea and Samaria announced that it seemed as though the "Gog and Magog process where the world is against us" had begun: "They emphasized that there is no reason to be alarmed by the world’s condemnation as it is a predicted result of fear of Israel’s success."
Messianic fever among fundamentalist Jews runs high these days. And, apparently, ancient prophecies require a war in which the world is united against Israel, and which "segue us into the period of Moshiach ben Dovid [Messiah son of David]."
If you read the blogs of people like Dov Bar-Lieb, you will be assaulted by passages like: "Only a generation just before Mashiach [Messiah] would come would need such merit" -- i.e., "the merit of that 6 million who perished" (at the hands of the Nazis), to bring in "Israel’s great redemption speedily in our day ...."
Roy Tov fears the war of Gog and Magog will deliver "Samson’s Option, a nuclear holocaust" -- "It may begin as a false flag attack; in order for this to work, the Jewish leaders must be able to claim ‘we were attacked; the entire world is still against us!’ Following the false flag attack, or a surgical Israeli strike on Iranian installations, the latter would be forced to make a defensive strike on Israel. ... Israel must force a cataclysmic attack on itself. ... Then, the culprit would be destroyed with the [nuclear] second strike capability acquired with the help of the state-of-the-art German submarines. This last step is necessary in order to destroy all proofs of the scheme, so that history would be written (again) by Zionist forces abroad ...."
Israel recently took delivery of its 4th German-built Dolphin class submarine.
Israeli news outlets claim that Netanyahu and Ehud Barak hope to force us into a war before our presidential election.
My suggestion: a backing of the "Fusion for Peace" proposal that has been put forth by American Eric Lerner and two Iranian physicists. According to Lerner, "Iran has become a major player in the small, but growing, global effort to achieve aneutronic fusion power," which promises to "make uranium enrichment obsolete, block proliferation everywhere, liberate the world from oil, and open up a new source of cheap, clean unlimited energy."
Is Israel about to offer up the entire world as a holocaust in order to kill that prospect? And what exactly would be the merit of that?
Jacqueline Brook,
Putney, Aug. 7
