EQUAL TIME is where Vermonters talk about issues ignored by the corporate media—mothers opposing toxic pollution, workers fighting for decent jobs, nurses working for health care reform, students speaking out about their education, farmers struggling against corporate agribusiness, and more.
Judy Solomon, a Senior VP for Health Care Policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, explains that the Republican plan to repeal most of the Affordable Care Act without replacing it would double the number of uninsured people to roughly 59 million. The vast majority of people becoming uninsured would be in working families. 35,000 fewer people in Vermont would have health insurance.
Will Lambek, an organizer with Migrant Justice/Justicia Migrante, discusses the reality that the great majority of Vermont’s dairy workers are undocumented, and now find themselves in President-elect Trump’s crosshairs. The hard-fought victories won by immigrant workers organizing for human rights must be defended and advanced in the Trump era.
Seth Ackerman makes the case in his Jacobin magazine article, A Blueprint for a New Party, that we need to think seriously about what it would take to form a democratic organization rooted in the working class. The Sanders campaign has demonstrated that a serious electoral politics to the left of the Democratic Party might be possible.
Charlie Post discusses the realignment within the Republican Party as the party establishment — those with the closest historic ties to old-line, WASP manufacturers, bankers, and financiers — have lost control of the party to a right-wing populist, Donald Trump. Charlie explains that a radical, right-wing, middle-class insurgency that began in the wake of the world economic crisis of 2007–8 has displaced, at least temporarily, the hegemonic capitalists in the Republican Party.
RJ Thompson, Executive Director of the Vermont Huts Association talks about their mission: “to enhance the backcountry experience in Vermont by connecting the year-round recreation community with the evolving network of hut, cabin, yurt and lodge operators. RJ explains that skiers, mountain bikers, and hikers have created many terific trails and glades. The Vermont Huts Association's goal is to link these trail systems via a network of backcountry huts, cabins, yurts and lodges.