1.
The differences between you and your opponent?
A
Life-Long History of Activism and Public Advocacy
I have been a lifelong activist on environmental
and social issues, and have fifteen years of legal
experience as a public advocate. My clients include
indigent criminal defendants, not-for-profit environmental
organizations and sportsmen’s clubs, organizations
supporting women’s reproductive health services, farmers and
small business owners. I’ve served on numerous
not-for-profit boards, served on the Middlebury Board of
Selectmen, and provided volunteer legal services to
countless organizations and individuals in need of help.
I’ve taught law at Greenfield Community College and Elms
College and often speak to high school classes and service
organizations about legal matters
An
Emphasis on Justice and Due Process, not on Letting Ends
Justify Means
Justice is not an end, it is a process — a
process which is fair and which respects the human dignity
of all parties. I have always held that, as long as the
process was fair, I can live with the result, even if it is
not reflective of my personal preference. My opponent
allows the ends to justify the use of less-than-just means,
such as relying on the Eugenics Study in his opposition to
the Abenaki petition for federal tribal recognition, or
being selective and skewed in choosing the witness
statements on which he relied and boldly quoted from in the
report on the Robert Woodward shooting, or disclosing
intimate details about the non-criminal behavior of Catholic
priests who were the subject of child abuse investigations.
Regardless of the sentiments behind each of these examples,
they each demonstrate a lack of regard for human dignity
which undermines the process of justice for all of us.
Gender
Outside of the all-female ticket of the Vermont
Grassroots Party, of the fifteen major candidates running
for state-wide office this year, only three are female —
Democratic incumbents Deb Markowitz and Liz Ready, and
myself. Standing alone, being female doesn’t make me a
better lawyer or a better potential Attorney General. But
our state government would be stronger and more balanced,
and the citizens of our state more equitably represented,
were there more women serving in state-wide offices. As a
woman, as a mother, I naturally have a different
perspective, a different philosophy about many issues, and
different priorities than most men do.
2.
What is the greatest challenge of public service?
The first of the two greatest challenges of
public service is effecting justice in the face of
controversy and emotional situations. You have to be
willing to accept end results you may not like, as long as
the process is fair. Justice equitably applies the rules of
process to all people and all parties. The second of the
two greatest challenges of public service is securing public
participation. Ordinarily, less than 50% of the eligible
voters in Vermont vote — and the turnout in Vermont is
higher than most states. When the winning candidates are
elected by 25% or less of the state’s adult population, were
are living in an oligarchy - not a democracy.
3.
What is the most important issue facing the State of
Vermont?
The most important issue facing the State of
Vermont today is the sense of hopelessness and
disenfranchisement among our youth. Our youth can’t afford
to go to college in Vermont. There is no ability to take
over the farm business when the property taxes make the land
unaffordable; there is no secure, life-long, good-paying
factory position waiting when the machine shops are sitting
empty and the buildings collapsing before new tenants can be
found.
4.
What advice would you give someone who was thinking about
entering public service?
A. Read “Plunkett of Tammany Hall”; see below.
B. See something of life first; get yourself to
the point that you have something substantive to give, not
just the urge to hold a title or public position.
C. Get to know people of every walk and creed
of life. As Plunkitt said, study human nature, and act
accordingly.
D. Honestly care.
5.
What is your favorite political book?
Although I refer constantly to the collection of Theodore
Roosevelt essays and speeches on the progressive movement
entitled “Social Justice and Popular Rule”, Arno Press, New
York, 1974, my favorite political book is “Plunkitt of
Tammany Hall: A Series of Very Plain Talks on Very Practical
Politics” by William L. Riordan, Dutton Press, 1963.
George Washington Plunkitt was a renowned Tammany ward boss,
an icon of the New York Democratic machine of the early
twentieth century. A number of my Irish immigrant ancestors
and relatives — the Hickeys, the Kellys — were a part of
Plunkitt’s Tammany organization. William Riordan of the New
York Post conducted a series of interviews with Plunkitt in
his “office”, Graziano’s shoe shine stand in the New York
County Courthouse off Foley Square. The talks include
Plunkitt’s well-reasoned distinctions between “good graft
and bad graft” and repeated scathing commentaries on the
fledgling civil service system. But most important to me is
the portrayal of machine politics as a deeply human
establishment, dependent on the interactions between Tammany
representatives and the host of humanity populating their
districts. Rather than depend on written political
positions and lengthy debates about philosophy, Tammany
operatives walked the street, knew every member of their
districts personally, and helped the lives of their
immigrant and downtrodden neighbors by extending a practical
hand holding a job, housing, clothes, English language
classes, or whatever was needed.
I’ve edited my favorite Plunkitt essay here:
To Hold Your
District:
Study Human Nature
and Act Accordin’
- George Washington Plunkitt
There’s
only one way to hold a district: you must study human nature
and act accordin’. You can’t study human nature in books.
Books is a hindrance more than anything else. If you have
been to college, so much the worse for you. You’ll have to
unlearn all you learned before you can get right down to
human nature, and unlearnin’ takes a lot of time. Some men
can never forget what they learned at college. Such men may
get to be district leaders by fluke, but they never last.
To learn
real human nature you have to go among the people, see them
and be seen. I know every man, woman, and child in the
Fifteenth District., except them that’s been born this
summer — and I know some of them , too. I know what they
like and what they don’t like, what they are strong at and
what they are weak in, and I reach them by approachin’ at
the right side.
For
instance, here’s how I gather in the young men. I hear of a
young feller that’s proud of his voice, thinks he can sing
fine. I ask him to come around to Washington Hall and join
our Glee Club. He comes and sings, and he’s a follower of
Plunkitt for life. Another young feller gains a reputation
as a baseball player in a vacant lot. I bring him into our
baseball club. That fixes him. You’ll find him workin’ for
my ticket at the polls next election day. Then there’s the
feller that likes rowin’ on the river, the young feller that
makes a name as a waltzer on his block, the young feller
that’s handy with his dukes — I rope them all in by givin’
them opportunities to show themselves off. I don’t trouble
them with political arguments. I just study human nature
and act accordin’.
As to the older votes, I reach them,
too. No, I don’t send them campaign literature. That’s
rot. People can get all the political stuff they want to
read — and a good deal more, too — in the papers. Who reads
speeches, nowadays, anyhow? It’s bad enough to listen to
them. You ain’t goin’ to gain any votes by stuffin’ the
letter boxes with campaign documents. Like as not you’ll
lose votes, for there’s nothin’ a man hates more than to
hear the letter carrier ring his bell and go to the letter
box expectin’ to find a letter he was lookin’ for, and find
only a lot of printed politics. I met a man this very
mornin’ who told me he voted the Democratic State ticket
last year just because the Republicans kept crammin’ his
letter box with campaign documents.
What tells
in holdin’ your grip on your district is to go right down
among the poor families and help them in the different ways
they need help. I’ve got a regular system for this. If
there’s a fire in Ninth, Tenth, or Eleventh Avenue, for
example, any hour of the day or night, I’m usually there
with some of my election district captains as soon as the
fire engines. If a family is burned out, I don’t ask
whether they are Republicans or Democrats, and I don’t refer
them to the Charity Organization Society, which would
investigate their case in a month or two and decide they
were worthy of help about the time they are dead from
starvation. I just get quarters for them, buy clothes for
them if their clothes were burned up, and fix them up till
they get things runnin’ again. It’s philanthropy, but it’s
politics, too — mighty good politics. Who can tell how many
votes one of these fires brings me? The poor are the most
grateful people in the world, and, let me tell yu, they have
more friends in their neighborhoods than the rich have in
theirs.
6.
What was your favorite political TV program?
I
can’t answer this question — I don’t have a television.
7.
How did you become involved in the Progressive Party?
I
was a lifelong party-line Democrat. I got involved in
political campaign activity around 12 or 13 years old. We
had a local organization called the Smithaven Political
Youth Caucus. We were technically non-partisan, and our
goal was to demonstrate that even people too young to vote
could have a positive impact on campaigns. We’d host
candidate forums, and submit questionnaires to candidate for
local office, then decide what local race to endorse, and
spend hours painting and planting signs, looking up phone
numbers, and doing other “grunt” work for our endorsed
candidate. We did make a difference. Because of our
socially liberal leanings, our candidates were almost always
Democrats.
Once I turned eighteen, I could not only vote, but could
find an official place in the Democratic Party. I sought
and received a County Committee seat, and eventually served
on the New York State Democratic Committee, and later in a
similar slot in Massachusetts after law school. I managed
local and state office campaigns on both a volunteer and
paid basis, and managed the local efforts of statewide and
national Democratic candidates campaigns. I was involved in
DSA — the labor-based Democratic Socialist Agenda movement
within the Democratic Party; I was involved in Young
Democrats, and attended Democratic Leadership training
school.
Somewhere along the line, a few things happened. One is
that my conservation ethics, support of sportsmen, and
firearms ownership gained me weird looks from some elements
of the Democratic party, though by no means from all.
Another is that I noticed that despite all the socially
liberal rhetoric, the Democrats were running far fewer women
candidates than the Republicans seemed to. More
importantly, the party machine structure in both New York
and Massachusetts was such that it had been made perfectly
clear to me that no matter how many years I toted signs and
manned phone banks, and no matter how bright, dedicated,
energetic, or perfect I might be for the job, I would never
be permitted to run for office on the party ticket because I
was not part of the right families or groups who were owed
various slots.
Finally, and more important still, I took a look around at
the Clinton administration and asked myself, “Is this what
I’ve been doing all this work for?” I saw the
self-indulgent wealthy circles of Clinton appointees blowing
our foreign policy and diplomatic relationships; missing the
boat on economic development in the former Soviet Union; and
perpetuating a demeaning view of women. My Democratic party
was, in my eyes, no longer the party of the immigrant, the
downtrodden, the working man and organized labor, the
environment, seniors, children — all the voiceless interests
which I’d worked for years believing that the Democratic
Party had under their wing.
I
left. It was a painful split. Being a Democrat was a big
part of my self-identity. I floundered, and wound up
uninvolved in partisan or campaign politics for a number of
years. I had moved to Vermont, was building my law
practice, active in various environmental and social issues,
and raising my daughter.
I
found to my surprise that there was a lot about the moderate
Vermont land-based Republican party that I liked. I greatly
admire Barbara Snelling, for instance. And the concerns of
farmers, of sportsmen interested in water quality issues,
and Vermont businesses struggling to hold a place in a
shifting global economy, were all things I could get behind.
At the same time, there were many things about the incumbent
Attorney General’s administration I did not like. I had
issue after issue with state agencies in which I believed
that the agency personnel were receiving unnecessarily
confrontational and defensive legal advice from their
departmental AG’s. AG policies regarding things like
serving subpoenas on state personnel or obtaining my
clients’ own records from state agencies were changed in
ways that cost the taxpayers money and favored form over
substance — or justice. Hearing my great-grandmother Jenny
Hickey rolling over in her grave, I announced my intention
to seek, by write-in, the Republican nomination for Attorney
General.
Bill Sorrell beat me out on the write-in vote and ran once
again as both a Democrat and a Republican. But I had
learned that, although I had much in common with that core
of agricultural, moderate Republicans, there was a loud
minority contingent even within the Vermont Republican party
with whom I could not comfortably find myself allied. I am
pro-choice, I oppose the death penalty, and support civil
unions and am not morally opposed to homosexuality, and I am
not Christian. While I have many valued Republican friends,
I could not commit myself to the Republican party.
Then I met Anthony Pollina. And I learned of the Vermont
Progressives — a new, home-grown, grass-roots, wide array of
people from around the state, some of them “drop-outs” from
other parties, others “drop-ins” from various social issues
or political non-participation. The more I talked to
Anthony, the more I realized how much we had in common on so
many issues. I watched, listened, and learned as the
Progressives gained major party status. I saw farmers,
sportsmen, writers, labor leaders, new Vermonters, old
Vermonters, and everyone in between finding their way into
this new party. And I saw the new party touting campaign
finance reform, universal health care, and advocacy for
those people whose voices get lost in the system.
A
life-long fan of Teddy Roosevelt, I saw many parallels
between the Vermont Progressive Party, and Roosevelt’s Bull
Moose Progressive movement of the nineteen-teens. TR’s
movement was a splinter from the Republican party, in
protest of the Republican move into representing big
corporate interests. Roosevelt was a major moving force
behind the modern conservation movement, an ardent hunter, a
champion of organized labor, and dedicated to rural
development and support of farmers and the rural poor. He
was a valiant soldier who also won the Nobel Peace Prize for
averting a devastating world war. He believed in good
health, strong family values, hard work, time to play, and a
true democracy which represents the will of the people, not
the monied interests among them. Vermont Progressives
didn’t see themselves as part of the Bull Moose party — but
I knew that at heart, they were.
Vermont had a proud history of independence — including
political independence. Most Vermonters split their
tickets, and don’t stick with a straight party line,
selecting their state legislators, state wide candidates,
and Congressional representatives based on individual
factors. This is clear if you take a look at the fact that
the legislature is usually Republican, the state-wide
offices usually Democrat, and Bernie Sanders wins by
unreachable margins as an ex-Socialist independent.
So when I decided to launch this timely bid for the Attorney
General’s office, my choice was between running as an
independent or as a Progressive. After long hard thought,
I committed to running on the Progressive ticket, and to
lending my support, time, skills, and political party
experience to building this unique new Vermont party. Not
being a part of the two standard national political parties
still gives me the independence and freedom from party
obligations which I believe is appropriate to the office of
Attorney General, the independently-elected top lawyer for
the people of Vermont. But being a Progressive gives me the
opportunity to speak about Progressive values and the
Progressive platform, to help other Progressive candidates
around the state, and to be a part of this exciting new
Progressive movement for the 21st century. No
matter the outcome of this election, I look forward to
working on building the Progressive party in the coming
years.
8. Who are your political mentors? What are
some of your favorite political quotes?
HUBERT HUMPHREY.
Perhaps it’s not accurate to describe Hubert Humphrey as a
political mentor. But the first political memory in my life
was sitting on my dad’s shoulders in the J.C.Penney parking
lot as Hubert Humphrey’s helicopter landed, chanting Give me
that vote for Hubert Humphrey, He’s good for You and Me.
THOMAS JEFFERSON AND THEODORE ROOSEVELT.
I’ve always summed up my political philosophies by
describing myself as a Jeffersonian Democrat and a (T.)
Roosevelt Republican. By this I would mean to point to
Jefferson’s emphasis on public education (the volume
entitled The Crusade Against Ignorance is quite informative
on this point); the Bill of Rights; his positions on state
rights and federalism , as reflected in the Federalist
Papers; and his ever-inquiring, renaissance character, with
his perpetual interest in literature, art, gardening,
science, travel, and exploration. I most admire Teddy
Roosevelt’s abiding belief in family, in conservation, in
the Progressive movement, in true democracy and keeping big
money out of politics, and both his leadership in time of
war and his extraordinary ability to bring about peace —
walk softly, and carry a big stick, as he said.
ROBERT KENNEDY.
Bobby Kennedy demonstrated how the law can be utilized to
effect social change. His efforts in the civil rights
movement — not as a community activist or elected as a
political leader, but as an Attorney General who advocated
for the people of the United States — changed the face of
our nation.
WAYNE PROSPECT.
I’m sure you’ve heard of the four gentlemen listed above;
I’m just as sure you’ve never heard of Wayne Prospect.
Wayne was the Suffolk County Legislator for whom I was proud
to work as an aide for several years. Together we fought
the Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant, wrote the Pine Barrens
protection legislation, and fought with pesticide
manufacturers over ground water pollution on the east end of
Long Island. Wayne is one of few politicians who, year
after year, continued to have the guts to do what he felt
was right and stand up and fight where others folded --
including on those issues personally dear to him, but where
he split with his Democratic party line. I learned a lot
from him.
Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.
- Patrick Henry
Ask not what your country can do for you, but rather ask
what you can do for your country.
- John F. Kennedy
From each according to ability, to each according to need.
There but for the grace of God go I.
Wherever there’s a cop beatin’ some guy,
or a hungry newborn baby cries,
or somebody’s lookin’ for a helpin’ hand,
a
decent job or a place to stand,
beside their campfire’s where I’ll be,
look in their eyes, ma, you’ll see me.
-The Ballad of Tom Jones
The gods of the hills are not the gods of the valleys.
-Ethan Allen
9.
Will the U.S. invade Iraq by December 2002? Should they
invade
I already lost the bet on this one. I thought
we’d be on the ground in Iraq by mid-November, just in time
for the election. Accounting for the delays in seeking
Congressional approval and U.N. cooperation, I now suspect
that American troops won’t be on the ground in Iraq until
March or April.
I have many close friends and many people who I
admire greatly who believe with all their hearts that we
need to invade Iraq, quickly, to avoid immanent harm to
Americans or others from weapons of mass destruction. I
sympathize with, and respect, their abiding fears and
concerns for the future actions of this unstable regime.
However, I most respectfully disagree that
invasion by U.S. troops is the appropriate action. American
foreign policy and diplomatic relations with the middle east
and all Islamic nations has been abysmal for at least 12
years or more. I am not confident that more than a small
handful of people in our federal government, at best, have a
good understanding of the culture, sentiments, politics, and
ideology of the people of the Muslim nations. And I am
certain that few people in the Muslim nations have a
realistic understanding of American culture and ideology,
since their primary contact with America is through MTV and
Playboy magazine (both dutifully, though minimally,
censored). The growing factions of extremely angry
anti-Americanism were patently obvious to me as a tourist in
India and Pakistan, but they seem to have escaped our
diplomatic corps and intelligence agencies. I can’t say I
was surprised that something like 9-11 happened.
The post 9-11 question for us to wrestle with
is: do we fix the problem, and immediately initiate a vastly
improved communications and diplomatic relationships program
with the Muslim nations, or do we strike back and seek to
oppress the outrage which was perpetuated upon us? Hitting
back with something as definitive and powerful as a ground
war against Iraq may make some Americans feel better in the
short term, but it will irrevocably eliminate the option of
diffusing tensions and establishing meaningful diplomatic
relationships with the Muslim Nations for many long years,
perhaps decades, to come. I do not believe we have any
rational sense of exactly what nature of powder keg we are
about to set off. I believe invading Iraq will incur an
unprecedented wrath upon Israel, despite Israel’s support
for the invasion. I believe invading Iraq will distort our
relationship with Saudi Arabia, which in the long run needs
to be severely altered, but in the short term will wreak
havoc on our oil supplies and prices while we don’t have
short-term energy alternatives in place and our economy is
already hurting. And, like the Persian Gulf war, I believe
an invasion of Iraq will kill hundreds of thousands of Iraqi
civilian men, women, and children, even if American armed
forces losses are likely to be minimal.
I’m not a pacifist; I don’t oppose war or acts
of violence on a purely moralistic basis. Such acts are
often justified and necessary in defense of one’s self,
one’s home or homeland, one’s family or one’s allies. I
believe it proper to intervene militarily to support the
rights of occupied and oppressed peoples to their own
political self-determination. I am not convinced that such
elements are present here, and I believe the costs may be
staggering, and the harms sought to be deferred or
eliminated may yet be averted by other means.
10.
What is your view of Juvenile Justice?
The
Court Diversion Program
The Attorney Generals office is, by statute, in
charge of developing and running a court diversion program
to keep kids having their first interaction with the
criminal justice system out of the courts and out of the
custody of the Department of Corrections. This gives the AG
an incredible opportunity to help the young people of our
state. I will start a mentoring system to pair kids with
members of the local community, so that instead of a
probation officer sitting in judgment of their daily
activities, kids will have a chance to learn life skills,
volunteer, or develop interests in a trade or business. And
I’ll take the Diversion program out into the schools,
coordinating with efforts like the DARE program and with
community resource officers to help kids get back on track
and stay on track, to develop their own highest human
potential. I don’t want to lock up Vermont’s future and
throw away the key. We need to give our kids goals, skills,
tools — and mostly, hope.
Heroin
Eradication
Heroin has erupted on the Vermont mediascape in
the last year, with at least two dozen of our young citizens
dead of heroin overdoses, and countless more in the throes
of life-debilitating addiction. But heroin has been
flooding into the state at an ever increasing pace for at
least a decade — and in some pockets of the state, it has
always existed among small, isolated groups of users. The
first step in heroin eradication is education — not just of
the young people who are likely to fall into using it, but
of all Vermonters. Heroin is in fact here, in every town in
the state, it is highly addictive, it is highly attractive
to kids who are otherwise feeling bored, unneeded, and
without a future worth staying clean for, and it is
presently cheaper than marijuana to get started on — until
the addiction rises to economically unsupportable levels,
and a wave of property crimes follows to fund the cravings.
I’ve heard a lot of talk about “gateway drugs” such as
marijuana, out of the perception that kids start on a “soft”
drug like pot and then work their way up. I find this to be
a leftover point of view from adults for whom a nickel bag
of pot had cost $5 back in high school. Today, marijuana
eradication has been so successful that, ironically, a lot
of kids start on that cheap, easily available drug — heroin.
Because of its pervasiveness and the intensity
of the addiction it creates, heroin can not be addressed by
law enforcement in the same way as drugs like marijuana.
The standard pattern of marijuana enforcement would be to
secure a few informants, set up a long program of
surveillance, and seek to bust the big supplier, thus
stopping the pipeline of supply to the local area. Outside
of the larger suppliers in Chittenden County, heroin doesn’t
follow the same distribution patterns in most of Vermont.
Dozens of individual addicts get desperate enough to make a
supply run or two to various points in Massachusetts or New
York for another batch. There isn’t one guy with a fedora
and a trench coat and a truckload, making deliveries. And
while long-term surveillance goes on looking for such a
character, dozens more Vermont kids become addicts, or die
from the drug.
Heroin eradication in Vermont is going to take
strong community policing tactics. Every single sale is
going to have to be stopped and charged at every turn to
keep new kids from falling into the pit of heroin
addiction. Local cops working with young people usually
know who is doing drugs, and when something has changed in
the local drug environment. We need to give our full
support to the local police officers who get to know the
kids in the schools and on the streets of our communities.
The arrests made in this type of heroin enforcement won’t
make the papers as another huge drug bust, but they will
stop more Vermont kids from becoming addicts, and will drive
heroin out of the state. Instead of locking our kids behind
bars, we can get them back on the street — to be the next
generation of responsible Vermont citizens.
11.
How will you use your environmental experience to enforce
the laws?
I have a master’s degree in environmental law.
I have worked as a land use planner, and as legal counsel to
numerous land trusts and environmental organizations. I
know that our environment is not merely an aesthetic
concern, it is of vital economic importance to Vermont. Our
top tourist industry for dollars generated is hunting and
fishing. Our fishing and boating related businesses — bait
shops, guide services, charter boats — have been severely
hurt by the poor quality of Vermont’s waterways. A
significant portion of our lakes, rivers, and streams do not
meet fishable/swimmable water quality standards. Drought
conditions over the last few years has only exacerbated this
situation.
I will immediately commence a program to enforce
the 1,000 un enforced storm water permits, and to bring our
new watershed permitting system into line with federal
standards. I will work with out state agencies to remove or
reconfigure the half-dozen unlicensed dams which are
generating utility company profits at the cost of our
fisheries and water quality. Peterson Dam — operating
without a license for over 12 years, generating less than 1%
of Vermont’s electrical power, and costing millions per year
in devastated estuarine habitat and lake sturgeon fishery
income — has got to come down. Our poor water quality is a
severe economic drain for Vermont. The excuse that it might
cost jobs to try to enforce environmental laws is hogwash —
we are in fact losing jobs, and independently owned, natural
resource based sustainable small businesses, by destroying
our waterways. And we’re mortgaging our health and our
future to boot.
12.
How will you fight predatory lending
Vermont
citizens of limited means or who are experiencing financial
difficulty are finding themselves the victims of predatory
lenders. Banks, credit card companies, and mortgage
companies, many of them operating over the internet, offer
Vermont residents credit at usurious rates and at terms that
violate Vermont law. At a time of economic downturn, the
effects of these sharp lending practices are particularly
painful to struggling Vermont families.
In my law
practice, I have seen case after case of first time
homebuyers, particularly those with credit problems or the
financial burdens of a young family, turning to
internet-based mortgage companies in the hope of getting out
of an expensive rental and into their own home. These
mortgage companies charge outrageous interest rates, tack on
thousands of dollars in processing fees, and include
provisions in their contracts which preclude the home buyer
from paying off their mortgage faster or from refinancing
once their credit becomes re-established. Many of the
contracts state that they are subject to laws of states
other than Vermont, and the closing process often occurs in
New Hampshire or simply through the mail.
Like many
other instances of internet fraud, one of the chief
difficulties in prosecuting predatory internet lenders is
locating the business itself and establishing legal
jurisdiction over it. Upon taking office as Attorney
General, I will take immediate action to find and prosecute
the mortgage companies who offer Vermont’s young families
real estate purchase loans over the internet under terms
that violate Vermont law. This will require a fresh
approach to investigation and prosecution. I intend to
bring onto the Attorney General staff a different kind of
investigator, a “computer whiz” rather than a traditional
crime scene investigator, who can dedicate him or herself to
tracking down the sources of internet fraud and crime.
It may
surprise many Vermonters to learn that our state does not
have a statute setting a maximum interest rate for credit
cards. The citizens of our state who have had financial bad
times, who lack credit or have been through bankruptcy, or
who are in desperate need of a line of credit for things
like medical bills, are sitting ducks for usurious credit
card companies. Last year, a friend of mine who has a
Spanish-sounding surname received a credit card offer in the
mail, entirely written in Spanish, offering a credit card to
persons of hispanic or latino heritage who may not be
comfortable dealing with an English-speaking lender. The
offered interest rate on this card was over 30%.
As
Attorney General, I will call on the legislature to work
with me to set reasonable caps on credit card interest rates
in Vermont. Our state needs to find effective, lasting
solutions to the problems of affordable housing and
universal, affordable health care — but leaving our state
citizens to fund their housing and medical bills under terms
which will effectively enslave them to predatory lenders is
unconscionable. It also just further exacerbates the
problem of the drain of economic resources out of our
state. I will prosecute predatory lenders, work diligently
with our legislature to establish better terms for Vermont
borrowers and address the basic needs of our citizens which
lead to oppressive personal debts, and open a dialogue with
Vermont’s banks and lending institutions to keep our
economic resources in our state.
13.
Being an NRA member, what is your view of the recent
sniper in D.C.? Will this allow gun control advocates to
gain an upper hand in the debate?
Persons who use a gun against fellow American
citizens, other than in defense of themselves, their homes
or families, or another in of such protection, have breached
the trust of all of us, and need must face severe criminal
consequences. Long before the existence of firearms,
however, there were serial killers, and history from Jack
the Ripper to the people who flew skyjacked airplanes into
the Twin Towers has shown that laws will not stop someone
hell-bent on murder. If the death penalty was not a
sufficient deterrent for the D.C. sniper, I doubt a new gun
law would have been.
Firearms are easy to obtain around the world
through criminal, black market, and open transactions.
Firearms and explosives are both extremely easy to
manufacture using common materials and tools. No law would
stop the person intent on obtaining either such device.
But stopping crime is not the primary purpose of
gun control, just as hunting is not the primary purpose of
the right to bear arms. Firearms ownership is a civil right
of free citizens, and gun control is social control designed
to shift power to governmental forces and away from
citizens. I have written extensively on this subject and
would ask you to read the essay I’ve posted on my website,
www.hill4ag.org, regarding firearms as a civil right.
Unfortunately, many well-meaning citizens, out
of the fear generated by this serial killer who uses a gun
as his tool of death, will seek to ban more guns, thinking
this will keep them safe from the next such act of
depravity. I hate to see people give up liberty and the
power of citizenship for the illusion of a moment’s
security. And illusion it is, for crime will always be among
us at some level, and it’s next path is unpredictable.
Police can’t keep the crime from your door; they are
generally called after a crime has occurred. An armed,
self-confident citizenry is the best possible defense
against such events, and against events even worse — like
the loss of our status as free Americans to a ever more
powerful centralized government.
14. Your favorite Teddy Roosevelt quote?
“We Progressives test the worth of all men and all measures
by asking how they contribute to the welfare of the men,
women, and children of whom this nation is composed.” Feb.
21, 1912.
Cindy
Hill
Interview:
Cindy Hill (Progressive) for the AG for the State of Vermont