In the fall of 2010, when the chance discovery of an out-of-sequence check revealed what turned out to be the biggest embezzlement in Vermont history, its victims kept quiet. The paper trail led straight to the criminal: Joyce Bellavance was filching massive amounts of cash from the Hardwick Electric Department, where she’d worked for 12 years. The numbers emerged — $1.4 million (later raised to $1.6 million) over 10 years’ time — as well as details about the loot: Pottery Barn furniture, Basin Harbor Club wedding, a Boston condo worth nearly $400K.... Read more

I saw a terrific movie the other night, Margin Call, about a fictional too-big-to-fail investment bank on the eve of the financial crisis of 2008. The firm has been trading mortgage-backed securities — gazillions of them — and, as the markets get volatile, a young analyst figures out that the firm is at risk for more than its entire capitalization. The film follows a group of executives as they decide how to save their asses — all aware that when the curtain falls, the stage will be strewn with bodies.... Read more

According to Minneapolis Examiner.com reporter Rick Ellis, the FBI, Department of Homeland Security and other federal police agencies have been advising cities on how to destroy their Occupy movement encampments. Ellis’ source at the Justice Department says the feds have recommended massive shows of police force, middle-of-the-night raids to avoid press coverage, and justification of the evictions using local zoning or health laws. DHS denies involvement.... Read more

“They just don’t get it.”

That’s what women were saying almost exactly 20 years ago, when the U.S. Senate endorsed Clarence Thomas’ nomination to the Supreme Court. Law professor Anita Hill had come forward with precise and sickening details of the nominee’s campaign of sexual harassment 10 years before that. Hill told how her boss bragged to her about his penis size and his prowess at oral sex, discussed pornographic movies and picked up a Coke can and asked who had left a pubic hair on top of it.... Read more

The closest ancestor of Occupy Wall Street was the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp in Berkshire, England. The encampment started in 1981, after some Welsh feminists called Women for Life on Earth marched from Cardiff to the RAF military base in Berkshire, asking to debate the siting of 96 U.S. cruise nuclear missiles there. Ignored, the women pitched their tents outside the fence. They were told to take their tents down. They slept under tarps or in the open.... Read more

Beneath the place that is now Foley Square, in lower Manhattan, there was once a spring-fed pond. The pond sent out streams that flowed east and west to the East and Hudson rivers, which pour around the southern tip of Manhattan into New York Harbor, which in turn opens through the Narrows and across another bay to the wide Atlantic Ocean. Now, play that backwards — ocean through bay through straits to harbor, harbor to rivers, rivers to streams to pond. Skip to 2011, and you get a sense of last Wednesday’s march in support of Occupy Wall Street.... Read more

Darling Hill, in the Northeast Kingdom town of Lyndonville, is one of those places they call God’s country. But, judging from the way some of the hill’s residents are talking, God is a shortsighted steward of his kingdom and a homophobe, to boot. Across the nation, an increasingly tight coalition of the Christian and economic factions of the Right has installed that same mean deity in a new trinity, atop the freedom to hate and the holiest of holies, property rights.... Read more

Politicians, journalists and even economists tend to talk about jobs the way TV meteorologists talk about the weather. Wages are declining, hours increasing. The young can’t get jobs, the old can’t retire — these conditions are like the temperature and barometric pressure: natural phenomena.... Read more

The other day I talked to a friend in Hyde Park who, along with her neighbors, is challenging a wireless communications tower slated for construction in her backyard. So what else is new?... Read more

I file this column before August 2, when the U.S. Congress will or will not have plunged the nation’s economy, and the world’s, deliberately into chaos for the second time in three years.

But whether or not that catastrophe is averted, the main event is already under way: a radical right-wing coup d’état.

This takeover is abetted by a Democratic president either too deluded to see that his adversaries are a horde of gray-suited Huns or too weak to hold the barbarians from the gates.... Read more