 Hi, this is Sandy Baird for What's Happening, our local news commentary. Mainly a lot today about local news as well as the COVID virus and the local shutdowns of most of many of our small businesses and the continuing shutdowns that have happened as a result of that virus. And with me today is Jared Carter, a professor at Vermont Law School and Pete Garretano, a retired citizen of this fair region and of the United States. And we're here to comment about what's happening in our local situation in politics and also in the world. And so we'll start today maybe with a local piece of information from Jared. What's going on with you? Yeah, what happened yesterday is what interests me. What happened yesterday? Oh, you mean the city council meeting? Meeting to behind closed doors. Yeah, yeah, on Zoom. Well, I don't know, why don't you start with this? No, you know, well, okay. The reason that I'm concerned about local politics and I think we're all concerned about politics in general is that the virus has been the result of the virus has been the shutdown of many of our local businesses of our public spaces. Frankly, I believe of the government itself. City Hall is still locked up. The libraries are locked up and no one can really access our local governments very easily. And it's all because of this supposed spread of this virus. And I think Pete Garretano, our friend over here will have stuff to say about that. But um, but I did want to talk to Jared Carter as well, because he is very interested in local politics as I am. And I think he basically had maybe could even tell us a little bit about the mayor's race, which will happen in March. But last night was yesterday. It wasn't last night. It was at noon. Special meeting of the city council was wasn't really called. Was it? I mean, I don't I saw no notices of it anywhere. Did you know? Okay, the mayor scheduled a city council meeting from noon till one o'clock. And of course it was on zoom. And as a result of that, the city council unanimously passed a resolution to control alcohol sales in our city. And they had to be shut off alcohol sales at first about 10 o'clock, but then it was extended to 11, which is basically going to hurt small bars, restaurants and all the places which sell liquor. Some of them don't even get started till 10 or 11 o'clock like, you know, Red Square. So I wanted to get Jared's comments about that. And just what did you think? Yeah, I don't remember the last time I made it up till 11 o'clock at night. So I wouldn't be at those bars anyway. But one thing I would say that both here in Burlington and nationally, the pandemic's impact on small businesses has been great. Great. Well, great crushing crushing right. Absolutely crushing. And I think you're seeing it a historic moment where huge swaths of the economy that we're already moving in this direction are moving more quickly towards e-commerce and the e-commerce giants that are going to further and further control the economy and further further exacerbate this income disparity that is at pandemic proportions. So I think it's it is very troubling. We see it becoming harder and harder for local small businesses, bars, restaurants, the mom and pop shops to function in our society. And I'm not personally convinced that getting back to your point about the 10 o'clock or 11 o'clock curfew hour, I'm all for following the data and following the science, where it leads, whether I believe in it politically or not. I haven't seen any data that shows that a bar that's struggling to survive during this pandemic is suddenly less safe at 11 01 PM than it was at 10 59. In other words, if it's safe enough to have those places open until 10 59, I'm not sure what the what the rationale is for closing them at 11 01 minute later, especially when in listening to folks around the city, they're really struggling to survive. Not sure that they can. So what impact does that have not only the business owners, the building owners, but also the people that work in the service industry, which is a huge part of our community. And they're young people. And they're young people. Absolutely. So I am concerned that there's this sentiment of almost one upsmanship, right? We've got to one up the next person. We've got to show that we're tougher as well, tougher on the virus, as opposed to smarter. And so if there was actual evidence to show that at 11 01 PM, the bars are less safe than they were at 10 59, you know, maybe I could get with that because I haven't been to the bars for 11 o'clock at night in a long time. But without that, it just doesn't make sense. And it has massive impacts on the small businesses, I think, in this community that are the beating heart of Burlington and really beating heart of the United States of America. Right. So we have a huge I think we have a huge wealth transfer going on right now. And to me, that is as troubling as any of the other wealth transfer. Well, you say what that means to you or to the economy. Well, if you look at the Jeff Bezos of the world, the Bill Gates of the world, the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world, their wealth has increased since this pandemic became began by billions of dollars. Why? Because people are now having to rely because of quarantine, because of other measures of government, having to rely on e commerce, buying things online, engaging with the economy, education, education online. And so these companies and their owners really stand to become much more powerful than they already are. Right. During the presidential election, Senator Sanders was always railing against the 1% and and the income inequality that our economy had. That has only gotten worse. And so to me, that's as troubling as anything else. Because as soon as that income inequality grows, the political power shifts even further than it already has. And those 1% are able to control the levers of government to their financial and political gains. And that's really, really troubling. Tying that back to Burlington. It's it's exactly why it's so important that we follow the data, we follow the science. And we come together as a community to make sure we can support these small businesses because without them, without the students that that that really make this city what it is without every member of the community. I think we're going to make things worse. And we've got a long way to go. So I think it's I think it's troubling seeing what's going on in Burlington right now. But I'm optimistic. Why? Well, look, I'm optimistic by nature. I guess as you maybe know. And I look around and I've certainly seen and you're both study history. You look at the times that people have been knocked down. And we've always gotten back up. And usually we've gotten back up better. Not perfectly. But let me just hear me out. So of course, they revolution. Yeah, American revolution, right? We got our Bill of Rights out of that. Right? I'm a constitutional or you practice constitutional law. I know Pete's a fan of the Constitution. We got our constitutional rights out of that. They weren't perfect, right? Obviously, they were, they were basically geared towards white men, women, African Americans, Native Americans, didn't benefit from that. We got our constitutional rights out of crisis. Yeah, civil war. Okay, massive upheaval. We ended slavery. We got the 1314th and 15th amendments, right? That birth Jim Crow. So a few steps forward, pushed back. The the Great Depression. Again, history is an interesting topic. But the Great Depression, we got a big war. We got a big war to but we got it, we got a new deal. We got Social Security. We got some of these, these things that help support people. And so every time I've seen this country in Burlington as a leader has historically been a leader, I think in this country, get knocked down, we get back up and we improve. And so that's why I'm optimistic. I don't see why this would be any different. I don't see why if we come together as a community, small businesses, students, seniors, working people come together as a community that Burlington can't be part of leading that recovery, that building Burlington back recovery that you just so need. Well, do we need new political leaders to do that? What do you think? I mean, the thing that interests me about this whole crisis is that what happened? How come that meeting was at noon to one o'clock? How come the citizens of Burlington did not know enough to zoom into this meeting? How come the mayor did this almost by fiat? And how come? Why are we being denied even knowledge of what the mayor is doing? Because he will continue to use the excuse of COVID to keep the government shut down. By the way, is the legislature gonna reopen in person? Do you know that? I'm not sure. It isn't is it? I don't know. I mean, it's all I mean, to comment about a couple of first points is that the small businesses are hurting the difference. I look back at the big financial collapse. The difference between this collapse and the way collapses. Businesses were hurting, but nobody was forced to shut down. So people didn't have money and jobs. People lost jobs, but nobody said you can't be open. Okay. So there's businesses that are going to go under because they're not even allowed to be open. It's not I mean, before they could have been open, maybe like a lifeline, they might have been selling less of what they were selling. But now there's been businesses that aren't allowed to have them go out to sell anything for months and months and months and they're not going to survive. And the people that we're talking about that are going to lose their jobs are all the I mean, most of them I would say are people that are making between minimum wage and maybe $30,000 a year. Those are the jobs that are the biggest risk. And recently the money the government was given got cut in half. So now I mean, I read where 80% of New York restaurants could go under the next month. 80% I mean, we're talking 10,000 restaurants in the next month because they're going to be a default on their their their lease. I mean, can you imagine that? How many people is that employee? I can't imagine what's happening. So to me the logic of this whole thing and you said something about being strong. Well, we've passed the point where that's there's any logic for that because Vermont is so clean right now. You look at Europe, Europe reopened way before they were at the level Vermont's at now. Vermont is lower than any European country right now and they opened what two, three, four weeks ago, Italy, Spain, who had a horrible COVID deaths according to that. So these people had where as bad as say New York City, those are some of the big areas northern Italy. Well, they said, okay, it's time to go. I mean, the thing has died down. Let's open up. Vermont has never got to there with their numbers and now they're way below even in testing. I mean, it's ludicrous to me that they're making the students do what they're do when they had tested 998 students and six of them became positive. That's like 0.2%. Okay, six out of 998. There is no problem right now. Okay, it is below any level that in the past you would have ever said we have a pandemic still and it's not happening now. So it's really time. I mean, there should have been a line drawn in the sand where they said, okay, when we reach this level, one percent positives or whatever it is, then we can reopen it safe and it's been stated by the CDC. That's 5%. We're at 0.2 to 0.5%. We're way past the time to open up. It's time to open up. It's ludicrous. I don't know who is directing this thing or why they're doing what they're doing, but there's absolutely no reason for it. Yeah, I mean, you pointed out the students. I think this idea that the students are somehow, it's us versus them that they are outsiders. They're vectors of disease. That's how we see them. Fine, but this us versus them, the students are such an important part of their community. They're members of this community. They are a big part of what makes this community thrive. And I'm all for being safe and making sure we follow the data, follow the science as best as we can, as imperfect as it is. But in the end, we've got to find a way to support these students coming back and embrace them coming back. Otherwise, all of those small businesses are going to be fall prey to the Bezos of the world. Jeff Bezos and several other of these .0001 percenters. I think my data might not be exact, but somewhere around $150 billion they've made since this pandemic began. That is sickening. These businesses that are about to close down, these guys should be kicking in to keep them going if nothing else. They don't care about those small businesses. I read an interesting one the other day, or just two days earlier, that Apple stock value went from $1 trillion to $2 trillion in three months. $1 trillion increase. $1 trillion. There was an article that I talked about, I think, with you guys even on an email by Naomi Klein, who's an economist and a sociologist from the left also. She's not a right-winger at all. She's a big supporter of Bernie Sanders. And what she describes as what is happening really is a transformation of capitalism. A real evolution in the stages of capitalism, which means that the small businesses are being cut out and shut down and collapsed for the benefit of these big monopolies and that we are moving into a stage of really monopoly capitalism, where places like Amazon get all the profit. What I'm saying is at least since the early 80s, Burlington has rejected that in many respects. You look at places like, and you're involved in this fight, the waterfront, public spaces, church street marketplace. These were radical ideas at the time that we're going to have a publicly accessible, granted, mall commercialism there, but you're going to have a public space. The waterfront was going to be public. Places like Burlington Telecom were going to be public assets. In many ways, Burlington put itself on the map because it rejected that sort of doctrine of vulture capitalism. And that's what made us attractive to students, to people wanting to come and live here and build the economy and grow the economy because you're different. And I think right now, this beautiful Lake Champlain behind us, it sort of feels like we're adrift on Lake Champlain. And that's all within the context of the, you know, the ongoing pandemic. But I think we do, we need to get back to focusing on what made, and I think has a potential to make Burlington exceptional again. We need to start believing that we are exceptional, that this community is exceptional. Right. But I think a lot of people are feeling tired. And so we need a vision for this city that allows people to embrace that, to remember what it's like to lead, to bring Burlington back, and to really feel good about it again. Try some new approaches to old problems, right? Lincoln said, you know, something along the lines of the dogmas of the quiet past are incompatible with the stormy present. And I think in many respects Burlington used to operate that way. Yeah. And we've lost our way. We've got, we've sold off Burlington Telecom. We've considered privatizing Church Street. We had to fight about that. We've had to fight about that. We lock homeless people up historically, recently. We put in a lot of fancy yacht slips for Canadians who can't even come here anymore. And I think that's what every other city, that's anywhere USA. And that's what I mean by we're adrift on Lake Champlain. We need to get back to being exceptional, build Burlington back, bring Burlington back. And that takes a vision. And I think it's lacking at the city level, right? But okay, yes. No, I totally agree with you about that. However, the counter argument from our mayor, apparently, is that in terms of we have to stay safe, not free, not creative, but we have to stay safe because of this pandemic. So Pete, maybe, how would you answer that? Well, I think I agree with that people are tired. They're worn out because, I mean, there's never in the history of our lives been a media blitz about anything not about a war, not about terrorism that's gone on relentlessly 24 seven on every TV station that about this. No, no, but they still talked about. Yeah, it's still talked about. Yes. And the message is it's kind of like it's worse than the terrorism thing where, you know, when you're through an airport, I always hate the fact that I have to go through this thing because that means they're assuming I'm a criminal. And I feel that's offensive that I should not be a suspected terrorist. There's no reason for anybody, you know, they have everything they know about. I mean, they can look and, you know, through all their files and see that I've never done anything that would make me a suspected terrorist. So why do I have to ever go through airport security? Okay. Well, now they're saying everybody is a suspected, typefully, Mary, basically. Anybody can infect you. You got to be careful. It could be that guy could be that guy wear a mask, stay six feet. And it's all baloney. You know, it's just it's the craziest thing that has happened that people that don't trust the media, they don't trust the government and they don't trust Trump in particular. Well, there's 50% that don't trust one side, 50% don't trust the other side. It depends on who's in the castle at the time that, you know, for the last eight years, there's 50% that didn't trust Obama. So it doesn't matter who's there. They don't trust and they don't generally trust pharmaceutical companies. And that's that's who's really making out right now. And people say to me, well, what do you think it's some big conspiracy? Not necessarily. I think you have opportunists, whether they're Amazon opportunists or the pharmaceutical companies, they see an opening, they see a chance where this thing is going to go. And they saw it, I guarantee you, in March when this started, somebody went, wow, you know, and said, we're going to make a lot of money from this. And, and, and, and, how, how, well, when everybody got closed into their houses, everybody that was in any kind of tech industry knew that they were going to, they were going to make money, right? Amazon knew they were going to make money. All the stores closed. You couldn't go out and go shopping. They knew where they're going to make money. And the pharmaceutical companies certainly knew they were going to make money as soon as this happened. They've been trying to get a vaccine out for a virus for 30 years. And they've never once succeeded, okay? They've never succeeded because what has happened every time it's happening right now is the virus came and it went and right about the end of it, they almost got the vaccine ready. And that's why they're rushing this one because they want to get it there before it's gone. I mean, it's gone in Europe. It's gone in the Northeast United States. It'll be gone probably in the same period of time in the South. It's usually a six-month thing if you look back at any of these things, whether it was SARS, whether it was MERS, whether it was the last, or the swine flu, they all last about the same amount of time. They peaked, they went out, they were done. They kind of, there was some kind of an immunity or the thing just died out. And there's really not a big difference in this one. The big differences that were testing healthy people and telling them they're sick. And that has never, ever happened before. It's the tests that we're using that just got invented and approved when the swine flu came along, okay? And that was the first time this PCR test was ever used. But back then it was a new technology, and I have CDC documents here, but I won't actually, I'll just quote from them, but you can look this up. They were telling people, don't go in. This is during swine flu, which was killing children. This was predominantly killing children, okay, back in 2009. They were telling people, okay, well, if you have the flu and you're sick, just stay home. You don't really need to go to the doctor. Think of how opposite that is right now. If you get really sick, then go to the hospital, then we'll test you and see what you have. That is the exact polar opposite of what's happening now. Now they're telling people, you may be sick, and we're going to tell you, even though you don't have symptoms, we'll tell you if you're sick, and then you have to stay away from people. If they had had this technology back then, they could have done the same thing with the swine flu. In retrospect, they looked, and you could look on CDC files again, and they estimated 30 million people had the swine flu, but it's an estimate just from the small amount of people that actually got tested, which was very, very small because only sick people were getting tested. Certain amount of people died, but they had this big range and say, well, maybe more and more died, and we didn't know. Okay, so this test has been the big thing that has caused the panic, and people have so many viruses in them that don't do anything to them, and that's why you have these asymptomatic people. They have this viral RNA in them. It doesn't necessarily become infectious. It's there just like herpes, just like mono, just like all these other viruses. There's apparently 200 different viruses possibly in everyone's body that have been identified as infectious viruses, and they're just there. They're just there. They don't necessarily do anything at any time. So every year UVM students came back, we could say, okay, let's test you for something. I guarantee you, if you picked one of them, you could find six out of 998 that had this, and if you wanted to test them for herpes, you could probably find 400 out of them. Right, so what do you do next year? We're kind of worried about herpes. Let's bring everybody in and give them a PCR test and see if they have herpes and create a panic. Well, you have herpes, you can't kiss anybody or have sex with anybody. Sorry. I mean, that's what they could do. That's what they could do with this test at InfiniDame. They could just keep doing this every year for everything to come along. Is there any decline in the numbers of tests that are happening in the United States? No. New York City was doing 50,000 a week. Are they still? I think now they're saying, look, we don't need to because they're just getting a minuscule number of positives out of their 50,000. 800,000 a day. Yeah. But now still? Well, this goes on, I think Pence said yesterday or something, 800,000 a day or the total number of tests that are being... And they're pretty much... I had a test yesterday. I know you did. It was painful, eh? It is painful. You did have to weigh up the nose thing. Yeah, yeah. My wife had to have that. Yeah, yeah. It was part of a sort of return to work protocol that I had to have one. And I'm not sure, I'm not sure who financed it, but it was quite a process. It'll be interesting to see your bill because I've heard $700 to $1,000 is what it starts before you get your copay and it's $20 or whatever or $10 or free. Well, that gets back to the broken nature of our healthcare system. Oh, my gosh, yeah. And I think you want to talk about who profits by any of this. The broken nature of our whole healthcare system just exacerbates that. So I feel like all of these underlying issues, all of these pre-existing conditions, if you will, that existed before the pandemic are just being exacerbated by the pandemic. And we darn well better take this opportunity to look at how we can fix them. Because I think in some respects, all of this focus on how many tests are we doing? Are we closing bars at 11? All of the focus on that can take away from some of the underlying problems that I think just basically have led to United States. And I think the data bears this out, doing worse than many about the other developed countries in the world on this. And you look at Canada. Yeah. Our neighbors to the north. It's not so hot. They're terribly strong. But I'm just saying in terms of their countries being taken over by this virus, either literally or figuratively, it's not chaos up there the way it is down here. It just isn't. The number of cases that they have, one of the days the United States reported 70,000 cases. And maybe some of these are asymptomatic. Maybe some of them aren't actually cases. I mean, that's above my pay grade. But 70,000 people were confirmed to have it. That same day, Canada had 366. You don't think the Canadian economy is going to recover more quickly than ours? So the fundamentals of the economy in a country that is dealing with it that way is very different than what we're facing now. I don't think Canada's bars are closing down at 11 o'clock at night. They did. They did. But they're now opening up. And the fact is that the United States is not recovering economically because some, obviously, people don't want things to be reopened. I don't mean people. People are desperate to have things reopened. But our political leaders don't seem to be desperate about that. I don't understand Mayor Weinberger. Well, but look who our political leaders are. Well, I'm not talking about up and down, up and down. Up and down, up and down. Yeah, no, I know that. Well, but if you look at really what's happening actually, President Trump wants to recover the economy. Mayor Weinberger doesn't seem to be wanting that. Well, look, I think the mayor has been a good bureaucrat over the past. Which mayor? Mayor Weinberger. He's been a good bureaucrat over the past however many, how many years has he been in office? He's been in now two terms, which is six years. So before this, our books were apparently balanced better. But what's fundamentally lacking and what I think is so important for real leadership is a vision. Look, we've lurched from one Wall Street scheme in this city to the next. Whether it's the hole in the ground, $250 million promised by another Don, Don Cinex, from New York City. And look, you and I and Pete have been saying for years that this wasn't going to work. Well, the Burlington Telecom seemed to. And it didn't. And it didn't. And then we moved to Burlington Telecom. Then we flipped to, let's privatize Church Street. Let's put a bunch of yacht slips in for the Canadians. I mean, it's lurching from one thing to another without any encompassing vision. And so I think that's what's really missing. The mayor has done some things well. From a bureaucratic, technocratic perspective. But there's no vision. There's no vision from bringing Burlington back. We're a drift in Lake Shemford. His vision always was to get us out of debt, I think. But yeah. Well, that's, we're back in debt. I know. Big time. Right. So now we need a vision to bring us back. Okay. The thing that I find puzzling about the whole COVID thing is that there have been pandemics, I guess before. Never has there been shutdowns of the entire economy. Never. So what happened, Pete? It's this test. I'm telling you. But that was before the test that the shutdowns were made. No, no. What happened? What happened was people were getting sick. They immediately started, I mean, you can look and the testing and it got ramped up and then all of a sudden the cases, like all of a sudden they see how many cases there are. And it's like, I mean, it's instantaneous because there was a lot of people that were asymptomatically ill. And all of a sudden they said, oh my gosh, we have all these cases. And so they said, but this didn't happen. Previously, because they weren't testing healthy people. They only people that were sick. And that's the difference between our country and many other countries. China, I mean, it's really comical. People say, well, what did China do? China had 4,500 deaths. That's where the thing started. That's all. I mean, 4,500. And they were all in one area. And you have a province, I think it's called Hubei, where Wuhan is, at all the deaths, the one next to it, I can't pronounce the name, starts with a J, has 50 million people, zero deaths touching it. Okay, that would be like, that'd be like New York City having all the deaths in New Jersey, having none. I mean, it's a bigger area, but it's kooky. Well, they don't, you know, who knows what happened, but they also don't report deaths that are heart attack as COVID. And that's what the United States is doing. And then the other thing, you can read the CDC documents, which they didn't do in 09 with swine flu. They have underlying symptoms now. And it says in here, you can assume, you can assume, you can presume. If you think it contributed to the death, just put COVID. So you can die of 25 different things as underlying conditions. And I had a list, I mean, ischemic heart failure, renal failure, diabetes, Alzheimer's, asthma, the list is long suicide. And if the coroner or medical examiner that does the cause of death enlisted, and there's the way the form is written, there's the immediate, and there's underlying. And they're telling you, right in here, that if COVID is on there, list heart disease or as underlying and not as the main cause of death. That completely changes the figures that we're getting because 90, I say 84, no, only 6% of the COVID reported deaths were had only COVID on them. All the other had between two and five underlying symptoms, which are, and that's why you see lots of people in retirement homes, people in, you know, hospices, because these people were already really sick. And it's just like with pneumonia, which this actually is, is a kind of pneumonia, that that's what people die of. They, you know, they're in there, they're sick, and then they get some kind of respiratory illness. So, yes, this is another respiratory illness, and it's hitting the people who get infected easily because they're, they're sick. But in the past, they would write down, he died from a heart attack because of this. Yeah. And who, I mean, who was this organized, you talked about who's benefiting. The pharmaceutical companies have to be just giddy about this whole thing, because it's all, you know, there's 50 of them working on a vaccine. They're getting billions of dollars to try to make one. They're making, we were talking about the test. I look this up. There's 32 companies approved for this test. All these little companies you've never heard of. 30 million, they want 30 million tests distributed or 50 million. So let's say each little company, Still? Yeah. Each little company gets to sell one million tests for a hundred dollars profit, which is probably way under it. They made a hundred million dollars sending out a little plastic thing to wherever they, they sent it to. Some companies what you're basically saying is that you're asking the question of who benefits. We know who benefits. Well, we don't. I don't think that's correct. This is a perfect example. So I mean, by the underlying health care system is completely broken. It's completely broken. You shouldn't, nobody should profit on that. Right. Right now, they have more power than the Pentagon. You know, and they talk about the players like we talked about 20 years ago. It was the military industrial complex. It was Wall Street, some other big corporations. So now you have Google, you have Amazon, you have Microsoft, you have all these pharmaceutical companies that are, have more power or as much power really as the Pentagon in decisions. And certainly as much power as the government. I mean, Matt Taibbi just wrote an arc on Rolling Stone about that. I saw that. Oh my gosh. It's, it's hard to read it. There's a one company got approval for a drug for COVID. They thought it was going to be fair to charge 48,000 dollars a dose. What? Yeah, 48,000. So then they said, well, gosh, maybe that's too much. It was like a construction estimate. And then they went, well, we'll bring it down to $3,000 a dose. All this drug did was possibly shorten your time in the hospital by four days. Yeah. Well, and the government because they control the government. We'll give them money for it. It's corporate welfare. I passed a woman on the drive in here. Maybe you did too on the corner of the street with a ski pole and a cup attached. Yeah, I saw it. Yeah. Reaching out to people driving by to get a few pennies. And we've got people in Congress who are screaming bloody murder about the fact that people are getting a pandemic on employment assistance that's now over. When in fact, if you look at the data, poverty in this country for the first time in a long time went down during the existence of the pandemic. Yeah, because the government was handing out money. Right, exactly. And so I think instead of handing it out to the the baseless of the world, the the the the Pfizer's of the world, the Novavax, the Moderna's of the world and giving them corporate welfare. Why does that poor woman have to be out there with her little cup? Why do the people have to walk by my house every every Friday today and pick through my recycling bin for my cheap domestic beer that I buy because I can't afford all the fancy Vermont beer. Can't don't believe it. Yeah, that that that is that is sickening to me. And again, not to sort of get away from the the the pandemic because that I think is illustrating all of these inequalities. But I want I really think part of what the city needs to do is start focusing on those sorts of things. Get back to business. If we can if we can safely open restaurants, do it. Yeah, if we can safe safely open stores, there's no reason in my mind that we can't safely open city government and the libraries and public spaces like libraries. Yeah. Again, safety is important. We've got to do it safely, but I don't see how we can't well if we can welcome people back into the shops and the bars and the restaurants and say that that's safe. Well, we should be able to do that with city government. I mean, that's democracy. Right. Well, I had an ongoing conversation, we'll say with the libraries. I do discussion groups with people like our age in the library. So we've always discussed current events. They've been very a lot of fun, for instance. So I want the libraries open because I don't want to do these discussion groups on Zoom, which to me are very ineffective, better than nothing, I guess, but very ineffective. So I've been having this ongoing discussion with the library and they continue to say, oh, well, we have to be safe. We have to be safe. Our workers say, blah, blah, blah. And I finally said to the librarians, we are a creative, great people and we are great Vermonters. We are great Americans. We have the intelligence to open safely and creatively and that has got to happen. I mean, I have faith in normal people. That's what that's the point of remembering that we are exceptional. Reminding ourselves that we can do this, that we can get back up and we can find creative solutions. Like you said, like you said, and you said, we have gone through crises before and it's been the ingenuity of the American people and the Vermonters in particular who have led us out of that because we are creative. Why can't we open the libraries? As you said, I don't understand either they want to look at all this data but the data is telling us to be open so I don't understand what they're looking at. I don't know. It makes no sense to me. The data, I mean, nobody's died in two months in Vermont, right? And there's been one person in the hospital apparently in the last two, three weeks. So it's totally insignificant. It's such a small number. It's ridiculous. So what data? I mean, what are they looking at? What are they thinking about? Is somebody else is the federal government? Is somebody else is the CDC? Is the NIH? Who's telling our leaders that they can't open? I don't understand. Is it our the Vermont Health Department? I mean, who's telling them? What what what are they looking at? I don't understand. Well, I mean, Governor Scott says every day, every other day, why we can't reopen? But who's telling well, I don't know. Well, but I would I mean, I think there are, I mean, I walk down Church Street and I would say by and large, and I think this gets back to this point about city government in particular and certainly libraries and other public spaces. I mean, I think to a large extent, aside from after 11 p.m. at night at the bars downtown, I think the commerce downtown is very much open. Sort of. Well, you see people there. Let's put it that way. Yes, you do. You do. Thank you. And so I think, I think, I think, I mean, I don't know what maybe we go around and say, what would be one thing you do if you were mayor for a day? I think one thing that we should be looking at in the city, aside from sort of a vision for our community, but also how can we open up city government so that people have access to city services and city government because a lot of people don't have access to broadband. A lot of people don't have access to the internet, particularly within our immigrant community. My kids are in sustainability academy, which we love. It's a wonderfully diverse community. And I sat through lots of Zoom classes with them last spring and some this summer where it was very obvious that a large segment of the population really wasn't able to interact virtually. So what about those people? How do they engage with government? And they're such an important fundamental part of our community. So I'm really concerned about the continuation of a closed down government to at least some version of in-person interaction. That's what I've been concerned about most from day one. Because it's discriminatory against the most vulnerable among us. How does the city council get away with saying this and making it a resolution and closing down basically closing down bars at 11 o'clock at night? Where do they get that legal authority? I think they get it from the emergency they say from the emergency powers of the governor. Well, there's no emergency anymore. There's no emergency. Yeah, that's what I don't understand. But the greater thing to me is the total collapse as I see it of civilization in a lot of ways. Our economy is busted. Our government is busted and operating behind screens. Our libraries are basically busted. Our schools, are we going to really force students, little kids to be on devices? Well, I will say this. Somebody that has kids in the schools, I do think what the schools are doing, at least from my own experience right now, I do think they're trying to strike a balance. Yes. So right now, people are allowed to choose if they want to be virtual or in-person, at least for part of that time. And the reason I say that I like that approach is I think the other thing to remember, especially in a small community like Burlington, is everybody is going to have different levels of comfort. And so you need to try to be able to meet people halfway. Otherwise, we are going to end up in this thing where it's like, you know, us versus them, one side yelling at the other and we're never really going to get there. So I think this approach allows people who maybe just still are comfortable to do it virtually. And those people that really need the in-person classes and want that to be able to do it. So I do think the schools are trying to strike the right balance and I get back to that point. If we can do it in the schools, if we can do it in the stores, if we can do it in the bars, if we can do it in the restaurants, how is the most fundamental part of our democracy, city government at the city level, still offering no in-person interaction as far as I know? And that's troubling. Right. What do you think, Pete? Well, if I was mayor, which I will never be. Or John there. No, because you don't live here. The first place. I don't live here. No, I live in Burma. I live in Charlotte. But yet to me, there's absolutely, I mean, I understand if people are worried and scared. And I respect the fact that they want to have their kids at home because the media blitz has been relentless. Right. I mean, I'm one of the few people and they're probably 10 or 20% like Sandy and I, who just don't believe this thing. We just think it's been overblown beyond anything reasonable. I mean, to me, part of the big problem was the whole lockdown was worse than if we had been open and I'll give you the reasoning. I mean, almost every place there's a lockdown. There was a surge within two weeks afterwards. What we did is we told everybody to go inside their house which kind of had to happen because you couldn't go anywhere else. I mean, they weren't definitely locked up in their house. So if you had a sick person, they were all together with the healthy people, making them sick. Okay. Other places, if you had somebody sick, they either went to the hospital, you isolate them, and everybody stayed to work. And then you say, I mean, this is just like time tested stuff. You have a fever. You have a cold. You have a cough. Stay away. Don't go to work. Stay home. There's no difference between this and what should have happened in this thing. If you're sick, stay home. And that's the approach a lot of other countries used. And I mean, that's the approach Sweden used and people criticized it. But their economy is better than any economy in Europe right now. It didn't dip down. Their death rates were about the same or a little lower. So instead of having this, they just had like a flat line thing, and then it was over with. So it was just, it was all just ridiculous to me that there was this panic about this thing. It was the worst thing ever. But if you look back at all the other ones and you read the book, this has been tried before. There's always been hair and fire thing where there was the bird flu, the swine flu. There's always been when it first came out, this is going to be the worst thing ever. And then it never kind of really panned out. I mean, I mean, you can go back to 1918, but none of us are that old. I know I'm not. But so I mean, none of these other things really ever were that horrible. But in the beginning, if you go back and read the newspaper about 2009, they were saying all the same things. Oh my gosh. But they all went away and the whole wave that accompanied that wasn't legitimate enough to keep it going. Because of what we're doing now, the way we change the classification of death and the testing, this enables this thing longer than it needs to be enabled. Because you're like I said, we keep saying, you keep telling people you have to get a test even though they have no symptoms. Well, I feel fine. Sorry, you have to get a test. You know, it's just it, you know, and the thing I didn't point out about this test is it doesn't tell you that you even have a live infectious virus. All it tells you is you have a snippet of RNA that matches up with the snippet of RNA that they've identified as being this virus. Okay, and then they have to go through this big process. They heat it. They cool it. They amplify it. And then they do this thing with cycles where if it gets detected early, that means is in your system but you can once again, you go on a CDC website and they'll tell you a positive PCR test does not tell you you have infectious virus. Okay, so it doesn't tell you what people think it tells you. It just tells you that you have something in you that may possibly just like all these other things make you sick. Okay, what I was always shocked at and maybe we should conclude pretty soon. What I was always shocked at was the virus thing as you point out that the fact of the virus, of course, is also medically not totally proven in the first one. Right. But what shocked me about this even if you accept it was the shutdowns. That never happened in history before, as I pointed out. We've had a lot of viruses, a lot of epidemics, a lot of pandemics. Healthy society did not collapse. And our society is, to me, and I may be an extremist on the verge of collapse, economic collapse, political collapse. What happened to the United States of America? We are people who have done magnificent stuff and also a lot of bad stuff for Monters as well. I believe that we have to get that spirit back and recreate our society. And that we have the ability to do it. And in line with that, to close, I wanted you to talk a little bit about what might happen politically. Yeah. Well, lots is going to happen politically. Obviously, we've got a presidential election. We've got the state level gubernatorial elections. But I think one of the things that I always think about is, how can, and I grew up in a family of activists, people that were engaged, trying to make the community a better place, environmentally, social justice, teachers. And that really instilled me with this idea that one should try to give back to the community they live in. You can really have an impact at the local level. I believe that, too. And so I think it's certainly time to start thinking about and exploring who is going to lead Burlington moving forward. And I think we need someone with a real vision. We've had a bureaucratic and technocratic approach that perhaps has helped balance some books. But now it's time to build Burlington back. It's time to build Burlington back and better. Absolutely. Three Bs, alliteration. Build Burlington back better so that we aren't simply lurching from one development project to the next with no real comprehensive vision and reminding ourselves, and that's the role of the mayor, to lead, to remind ourselves that we are exceptional, that we can get back up from this and that Burlington can lead not only Vermont, but quite frankly the entire country has done in the past. So I think it's really important to start exploring what that might look like and who's best situated to do that. And I don't know whether it's Pete, you, maybe me. Not him, he lives in Sherlock. So Pete's excluded. I'm a foreigner. But I think the time has come. And I think the people of Burlington are ready for that. They're ready for a new vision because I think there is a sentiment that we've been a drift and it's time to tack, to continue the Lake Champlain analogy and get back on track and make Burlington a leader again. And I think that means that there's a mayor's race in March that we are all going to attend to, right? Absolutely. And last, I just want to say something more or less a personal level. I live in a student neighborhood and I live on Looma Street which is in the heart of the student ghetto and everybody in that neighborhood except me and a couple of others are really trying to control the students coming back and some people are even suggesting that students, UVM students, Champlain students and others should not come back because they see them as some sort of a vector of some kind of a disease. I would say from the bottom of my heart I welcome the students back in this town. If they can come back safely of course that would be the ideal situation but we in my view have to have young people back in this community studying at UVM to preserve UVM and to preserve the cultural and economic benefits that they bring to this whole community. So I'm just saying welcome back students even though they might not hear it from many people. I welcome them back and I hope they do come back. So with that I think that we that what's happening maybe will occur in a couple of weeks but thank you especially to CCTV which showed up in person to take this program. It's not a Zoom presentation is held at the wonderful and beautiful St. John's Club and I thank CCTV in particular for coming out to do this today. And thanks Jared and Pete for being here with me and we'll see in a couple of weeks. Thank you Sandy always a pleasure. Thank you.