Barre Montpelier Times Argus - Diamondstone on Slate for 19th Time

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Barre Montpelier Times Argus - Diamondstone on Slate for 19th Time

Peter Hirschfeld

At 73 years old, Peter Diamondstone may well be the most prolific candidate for public office the state has ever known.

Since 1970, when he launched his inaugural bid for attorney general, the socialist stalwart has run for various offices under different party banners every two years.

"I think this is the second time I've been a candidate for governor," Diamondstone said Friday.

This year, he bears the Liberty Union tag, a party around which true-blue Vermont socialists have coalesced since it earned major-party status in recent years. He unabashedly calls himself the "Castro" of the Vermont Liberty Union Party, and he revels in discourse on socialist polemics.

"Socialism is the only way — it's not even an option anymore," Diamondstone says. "Capitalism requires violence as a tool of policy. It requires the exploitation of resources on the planet. It requires the exploitation of people.

"Socialism has its problems," he says, "but at least we can stop exploiting the planet and people and stop using violence as a policy."

God help the reporter that asks Diamondstone why he's "running" for office. Over the years the Brattleboro grandfather has developed a sensitivity to media verbiage. "Running," he says, is for athletes, horses and warriors. He prefers to view his candidacy as part of a statewide hiring process.

"When you use the language of sports and war, words like 'run,' people in journalism need to do that to sell papers and get people to listen," he says.

Diamondstone has his own way of getting people to listen. As a "fringe" candidate — another term the former lawyer abhors — he is often treated as a black sheep, ushered from the pack to ensure speaking time for the more "serious" contenders. He has been arrested more than a half-dozen times — most recently in Waitsfield at a candidates forum in July — for trying to insinuate himself in debates to which he wasn't invited. He notes that he has never been brought to trial or convicted for any of the alleged transgressions.

"Silencing opinions robs the whole human race," says Diamondstone, paraphrasing John Stuart Mill. (During a 90-minute interview, he also cited Noam Chomsky and Albert Einstein, whom he described as one of the "most perceptive people in the science industry.")

"Most people interpret the First Amendment to protect the right of the Fourth Estate, to protect speakers, politicians," Diamondstone says. "I don't really interpret it that way at all, and I don't think the people who wrote it interpreted it that way."

The purpose of the First Amendment, Diamondstone says, is to ensure the public's right to hear what people like him have to say.

"That's the point of the First Amendment — that the people are entitled to hear and read the opinions of everyone," Diamondstone says. "Not that I have the right to speak them, but that they have the right to hear them."

Diamondstone has plenty to say, and he's carried his message to audiences of varying sizes around the state. He differentiates between his long-term goals and short-term policy initiatives. The former includes, most notably, Vermont's secession from the United States of America. Following the $700 billion Wall Street "bailout" approved by Congress on Friday, Diamondstone says, the issue of secession ought not to seem controversial.

"There's just no benefit anymore," Diamondstone says of Vermont's membership in the United States. "If we force secession, we're going to work less, get paid the same and have more jobs for people."

As for his gubernatorial agenda, Diamondstone leads off with a plan for rehabilitating Vermont watersheds.

"What we need to do is require all new parking lots to be unpaved and grassed," he says. "It means they occasionally won't be useful and businesses will have to close. When it comes to those parking lots already in existence, when those pavements disintegrate, you can't repave them. That's how we stop runoff into brooks and streams."

He also promises to disband the Vermont National Guard.

"We set up a civilian militia, and not a state militia, so the national government can't shanghai people from Vermont to go fight in imperialist wars," he says.

The Diamondstone economic agenda relies in large part on secession, and includes the formation of a new "state bank" that issues Vermont currency and a radical compression of income strata.

Under Diamondstone's plan, no one can make more than $75,000 per year, and no one can make less than $15,000.

"The wealthiest in Vermont will have to sell their yachts, that's all," he says of a 100 percent tax on income over the proscribed limit.

He promises an accompanying increase in quality of life. Workers will be guaranteed 30-hour weeks, four weeks of paid vacation and 10 paid holidays.

"Part of the economy is based on people buying stuff they don't need," he says. "Vermont's going to change. We're not going to buy stuff we don't need."

Diamondstone wants to pay youngsters a wage for going to school, shutter Vermont Yankee, and set up a Vermont Drug Administration to replace the FDA that presently regulates medicines.

He points to high levels of wood alcohol in aspartame as evidence of the FDA's malfeasance, and says recommendations for yearly mammograms ensure that women eventually contract breast cancer.

"Mammograms cause cancer. Everybody knows it, because radiation causes cancer," Diamondstone says. "The people who are building these machines have to make money, the people in the pharmacy business have to make money, and the hospitals have to make money. … It's all about making money."

Diamondstone is earnest in his vision for a more beneficent government. He says he hopes to bring Vermont closer to that vision by winning the November election, but doesn't necessarily "expect" that voters are ready to make the leap.

Still, he retains irrepressible optimism for a future, however distant, in which the populace embraces the ideals he's spent much of his life espousing.

"Socialism says no production for profit. Profit is how we destroy people, how we kill people. It's all about markets," Diamondstone says. "No more production for profit. Only production for need. That's my kind of socialism."

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