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From: "GlobalCirclenet" <webmaster(at)globalcircle.net>
Date: Tue Apr 3, 2007 10:52:56 PM Australia/Brisbane
To: globalnetnews-summary(at)lists.riseup.net
Subject: [globalnetnews-summary] Will Vermont Secede from the Union?
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http://www.alternet.org/story/50056/
Will Vermont Secede from the Union?
By Ian Baldwin and Frank Bryan, The Washington Post
Posted on April 3, 2007
The winds of secession are blowing in the Green Mountain State.
Vermont was once an independent republic, and it can be one again. We
think the time to make that happen is now. Over the past 50 years,
the U.S. government has grown too big, too corrupt and too aggressive
toward the world, toward its own citizens and toward local democratic
institutions. It has abandoned the democratic vision of its founders
and eroded Americans' fundamental freedoms.
Vermont did not join the Union to become part of an empire.
Some of us therefore seek permission to leave.
A decade before the War of Independence, Vermont became New England's
first frontier, settled by pioneers escaping colonial bondage who
hewed settlements across a lush region whose spine is the Green
Mountains. These independent folk brought with them what Henry David
Thoreau called the "true American Congress" -- the New England town
meeting, which is still the legislature for nearly all of Vermont's
237 towns. Here every citizen is a legislator who helps fashion the
rules that govern the locality.
Today, however, Vermont no longer controls even its own National
Guard, a domestic emergency force that is now employed in an imperial
war 6,000 miles away. The 9/11 commission report says that "the
American homeland is the planet." To defend this "homeland," the
United States spends six times as much on its military as China, the
next highest-spending nation, funding more than 730 military bases in
more than 130 countries, abetted by more than 100 military space
satellites and more than 100,000 seaborne battle-ready forces. This
is the greatest military colossus ever forged.
Few heed George Washington's Farewell Address, which warned against
the danger of a permanent large standing army that "can be regarded
as particularly hostile to republican liberty." Or that of a later
general-become-president: "We must never let the weight of [the
military-industrial complex] endanger our liberties or democratic
processes." Dwight D. Eisenhower pointedly included the word
"congressional" after "military-industrial" but allowed his advisers
to excise it. That word completes a true description of the hidden
threat to democracy in the United States.
The two of us are typical of the diversity of Vermont's secessionist
movement: one descended from old Vermonter stock, the other a more
recent arrival -- a "flatlander" from down country. Our Vermont
homeland remains economically conservative and socially liberal. And
the love of freedom runs deep in its psyche.
Vermont seceded from the British Empire in 1777 and stood free for 14
years, until 1791. Its constitution -- which preceded the U.S.
Constitution by more than a decade -- was the first to prohibit
slavery in the New World and to guarantee universal manhood suffrage.
Vermont issued its own currency, ran its own postal service,
developed its own foreign relations, grew its own food, made its own
roads and paid for its own militia. No other state, not even Texas,
governed itself more thoroughly or longer before giving up its
nationhood and joining the Union.
But the seeds of disunion have been growing since the beginning.
Vermont more or less sat out the War of 1812, and its governor
ordered troops fighting the British to disengage and come home.
Vermont fought the Civil War primarily to end slavery; Abraham
Lincoln did so primarily to save the Union. Vermont's record on the
slavery issue was so strong that Georgia's legislature resolved that
a ditch be dug around the "pestiferous" state and it be floated out
to sea.
After the Great Flood of 1927, the worst natural disaster in the
state's history, President Calvin Coolidge (a Vermonter) offered
help. Vermont's governor replied, "Vermont will take care of its
own." In 1936, town meetings rejected a huge federal highway
referendum that would have blacktopped the Green Mountain crest line
from Massachusetts to Canada.
Nor did Vermont sign on when imperial Washington demanded that the
state raise its drinking age from 18 to 21 in 1985. The federal
government thereupon resorted to its favored tactic, blackmail. Raise
your drinking age, said Ronald Reagan, or we'll take away the money
you need to keep the interstates paved. Vermont took its case for
state control to the Supreme Court -- and lost.
It's quite simple. The United States has destroyed the 10th
Amendment, which says that "powers not delegated to the United States
by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved
to the States respectively, or to the people."
The present movement for secession has been gathering steam for a
decade and a half. In preparation for Vermont's bicentennial in 1991,
public debates -- moderated by then-Lt. Gov. Howard Dean -- were held
in seven towns before crowds that averaged 230 citizens. At the end
of each, Dean asked all those in favor of Vermont's seceding from the
Union to stand and be counted. In town after town, solid majorities
stood. The final count: 999 (62 percent) for secession and 608 opposed.
In early 2003, transplanted Southerner and retired Duke University
economics professor Thomas Naylor gave a speech at Johnson State
College opposing the Iraq war. When he pitched the idea of secession
to the crowd, he saw many eyes "light up," he said. Later that year,
he and several others started a loosely organized movement (now a
think tank) called the Second Vermont Republic, which has an
independent quarterly journal, Vermont Commons, and a Web site.
In October 2005, about 300 Vermonters attended a statewide convention
on the question of secession. Six months later, the annual Vermont
Poll of the University of Vermont's Center for Rural Studies found
that about 8 percent of respondents replied "yes" to peaceful
secession, arguably making Vermont foremost among the many states
with secessionist movements (including Alaska, California, Hawaii,
New Hampshire, South Carolina and Texas).
We secessionists believe that the 350-year swing of history's
pendulum toward large, centralized imperial states is once again
reversing itself.
Why? First, the cost of oil and gas. According to urban planner James
Howard Kunstler, "Anything organized on a gigantic scale ... will
probably falter in the energy-scarce future." Second, third-wave
technology is as inherently democratic and decentralist as second-
wave technology was authoritarian and centralist. Gov. Jim Douglas
wants Vermont to be the first "e-state," making broadband Internet
access available to every household and business in the state by
2010. Vermont will soon be fully wired into the global social commons.
Against this backdrop, secessionists from all over the state will
gather in June to plan a grass-roots campaign to get at least 200
towns to vote by 2012 on independence. We believe that one outcome of
this meeting will be dialogues among different communities of
Vermonters committed to achieving local economic vitality, be they
farmers, entrepreneurs, bankers, merchants, lawyers, independent
media providers, construction workers, manufacturers, artists,
entertainers or anyone else with a stake in Vermont's future --
anyone for whom freedom is not just a slogan.
If Vermonters succeed in once again inventing vibrant local
economies, these in turn may reinvigorate the small-scale democratic
town meeting tradition, the true American Congress, and re-create the
rudiments of a republic once again able to make its own way in the
world. The once and future republic of Vermont.
----------
Ian Baldwin is publisher of Vermont Commons. Frank Bryan, a political
science professor at the University of Vermont, is author of "Real
Democracy: The New England Town Meeting and How It Works."