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Dead Constitution See other Dead Constitution Articles Title: U.S. Out of Vermont! Move over, Texas: In the Green Mountain State, it’s leftists who want to secede Last September, about 60 Vermonters met in the chambers of the house of representatives in Montpelier to celebrate the state’s “independence spirit” and to discuss the goals of “environmental sustainability, economic justice, and Vermont self-determination.” The speaker of the house had given up the space free of charge for the one-day conference. First at the podium was a Princeton- educated yak farmer and professor of journalism named Rob Williams, one of the organizers of the event, who at 9 A.M. opened the proceedings by acknowledging what he called “some unpleasant and hard truths.” Amid the twin global crises of peak oil and climate change, the United States was “an out-of-control empire.” It was “unresponsive to the needs, concerns, and desires of ordinary citizens.” Williams, who wore a T-shirt that said “U.S. Out of Vermont,” did not advocate revolution. He was looking for a divorce. He wanted Vermont to secede. “Nonviolent secession,” he said, “the detaching from empire and exercising our rights to independence, a deeply American right first expressed in the Declaration of Independence, is a right that demands re-exploration today.” Williams noted that Vermont is one of only three states, along with Texas and Hawaii, that ever existed as an independent republic – in Vermont’s case, from 1777 to 1791 – and that as “a national leader on progressive political issues,” the state was “uniquely poised to lead this national conversation on self- determination.” The murmuring response from the crowd suggested they’d heard it before. Williams and his fellow travelers – who constituted not quite a movement, he said, but more “a network of critical observers” – had been calling for separation from the U.S. since 2003. They had gathered in the ornate rooms of the state house to spread the word in 2005 and again in 2008 and now in 2012. Vermont had not yet separated, but the secessionists who were calling for a “Second Vermont Republic” had gained notoriety, and some small influence, across the state. The conference’s attendees included an ecofeminist named Lierre Keith, co-author of Deep Green Resistance, who reported that “capitalism is literally insane” and urged the collapse of industrial civilization; a man in a kaffiyeh who enthused over a recent story about a rural Vermonter who, faced with police harassment over his use of marijuana, mounted his tractor, drove into town, and crushed seven sheriff’s cruisers under the treads of the behemoth machine; a musician who sang a tune called “Totalitarian Democracy”; a thespian garbed in 18th- century blouse and boots and cravat who re-enacted Ethan Allen, the farmer- soldier who led Vermont’s war of secession against New York in 1777; and a troupe of female dancers from the radical Bread and Puppet Theater, dressed all in white, who chanted a series of poems about “upriser calisthenics.” The morning’s keynote speaker, historian and author Morris Berman, drew on his latest book, Why America Failed. As he writes, “The principal goal of North American civilization is and always has been an ever-expanding economy – affluence – and endless technological innovation – ‘progress.’” That’s made us “a nation of hustlers … a people relentlessly on the make.” The hustling mentality, seeing no limits to acquisitiveness, founded on the delusion of permanent growth – otherwise known as the American Dream – produced permanent instability and crisis. A nation of hustlers, argued Berman, was bound to fail. It could do nothing else. Williams was nodding along. “Only in Vermont,” he told me, “would a legislature allow this sort of thing on its floor.” During the Obama years, secession has mostly been an antic folly of the political right, courtesy of Texas nationalists, Dixie nostalgists, white supremacists, “sovereign citizens,” and gun nuts. There was no small amount of hypocrisy, of course, in this conservative rebellion. When Texas Governor Rick Perry in 2009 spoke publicly about a possible Lone Star secession, he billed it as a constitutional right in the face of overreaching government – though Republicans mostly hadn’t complained when George W. Bush was demanding profligate budgets and stabbing the sacred document with pencil holes. Yet here in granola-eating, hyper-lefty, Subaru-driving Vermont was a secession effort that had been loud during the Bush years, had not ceased its complaining under Barack Obama, did not care for party affiliation, and had welcomed into its midst gun nuts and lumberjacks and professors, socialists and libertarians and anarchists, ex-Republicans and ex-Democrats, truck drivers and schoolteachers and waitresses, students and artists and musicians and poets, farmers and hunters and wooly-haired woodsmen. The manifesto that elaborated their platform was read at the conference: a 1,400-word mouthful that echoed the Declaration of Independence in its petition of grievances. “[T]ransnational megacompanies and big government,” it proclaimed, “control us through money, markets, and media, sapping our political will, civil liberties, collective memory, traditional cultures.” The document was signed by, among others, its principal authors, a professor emeritus of economics at Duke University named Thomas Naylor and the decentralist philosopher Kirkpatrick Sale, author of Human Scale. “Citizens,” it concluded, “lend your name to this manifesto and join in the honorable task of rejecting the immoral, corrupt, decaying, dying, failing American Empire and seeking its rapid and peaceful dissolution before it takes us all down with it.” Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 1.
#1. To: Ada (#0)
Excellent article - thanks.
#3. To: Lod (#1)
Why do you say that this is an excellent article? Global warming and peak oil? He describes in his story about "capitalist system". Does he realise that it is driven by the funny money system and that it supplies exspansive and never ending growth and that is the nature of that beast? Does he know and understand the "legislative democracy" that smashes property and individual rights? Lod, tell the truth, did you read this after 7 pm?
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