What's Going On Out There?

by Kirkpatrick Sale

This fall sees the launch of The Middlebury Institute, a think-tank devoted, as it says, to “the study of separatism, secession, and self-determination,” specifically in the states of America beyond Vermont but ultimately anywhere in the world. It does not exist yet as an actual place—it embodies an idea but doesn't need a building—and does not even exist in Middlebury; it takes its name from the November 2004 “Radcon” conference in that city and the Middlebury Declaration issued there. As the opening statement from Thomas Naylor and me puts it, “The Middlebury Institute hopes to foster a national movement in the United States that will:

The Scourge of Bigness: A Secessionist Primer

By Thomas Naylor

Instead of union, let us have disunion. Instead of fusing the small, let us dismember the big. Instead of creating fewer and larger states, let us create more and smaller ones. - Leopold Kohr

During the Cold War, Ronald Reagan used to rail against the Soviet Union, which he affectionately referred to as the “evil empire.” After 9/11, George W. Bush warned us repeatedly of the perils of the “axis of evil” consisting of Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. Both portrayed America as the source of goodness and light in contrast to our demonic enemies enshrouded in darkness. The line had been drawn in the sand.

War, Katrina, and the Second Vermont Republic

By Ben Scotch

Here's an easy question to invite you into my meanderings: How many times did the First Vermont Republic begin a war?

None? Bingo.

Okay, there are huge differences between the world of the late 18th century and the post-9/11 21st-century world. But there are similarities as well, and it is time to reexamine the role of U.S. states and their National Guard units in questions of war and peace, with special emphasis on wars of choice—wars that have no credible relationship to national defense.

In the nation we joined as the 14th state in 1791 the focus of the military was the state militias, rather than a national army. Indeed, fear of a standing army was one of the issues that the Colonies had with their British rulers. The decline in the independence of state militias and the simultaneous rise of the United States as the dominant world military power during the 20th century are not coincidental. During the 19th century the states retained significant powers over their militias (renamed the National Guard in 1903), though they exercised no power under the War Clause and could not act independently where the president undertook military action without a declaration.

What To Do In Our Crazy Life? Attend Democracy School

By Dave Ratcliffe

Last year I attended a three-day course of the Daniel Pennock Democracy School, known as “Democracy School” and presented by Thomas Linzey and Richard Grossman, founder and cofounder, respectively, of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) and the Program on Corporations, Law, and Democracy (POCLAD). Democracy School explores why democratic self-government is impossible when corporations assert their “constitutional rights” against those of individual citizens and their communities. Our group learned how processes being developed in rural Pennsylvania are empowering local communities to assert their own inborn sovereignty. We learned we can create the type of ferment that people before us created when they organized to abolish slavery and give women the rights all must have if any are to be truly free.

EDITORIAL: What's Changed, What's the Same?

Publisher Ian Baldwin

If nothing else, you should come away from reading this month's Commons with a clearer sense of our history and potential for enacting democracy, especially in our own communities. These pages are filled with ideas and values, twisting through time into the cord of history, and they fill you with the sense that in the long term of generations there is much of fundamental import that changes. And yet, there is much that stays the same.

There is just enough deep change over time to give us the hope for achieving more: more freedom and equality under law for all. Were it not for this hope, what do you suppose could be the glue that has held us together and animated us as a single polity for well over 200 years? Is it not this hope that is now compromised by a nation become an empire?

What Is Secession?

By Donald W. Livingston

Talk about secession makes Americans nervous. For many it evokes images of the Civil War, and is emotionally (if not logically) tied to slavery, war, and anarchy. That the word “secession” is laden with these negative connotations should be surprising since America was born in an act of secession. The Declaration of Independence is a secession document justifying an act whereby “one people...dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another.” George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson were secessionists. Americans should be the last people in the world embarrassed by the thought of secession. To understand both why secession is at the heart of the American political tradition and why Americans are nervous about it, we need to review the strange history of the idea.

9/11: The Deeper Conspiracy

A letter by Robert Riversong

To devote an entire issue of Vermont Commons to exposing the 9/11 conspiracy was a bold and necessary act. The gatekeepers of information are trying desperately to keep us in the dark, and democracy flourishes only in the light of day. But describing the omissions and distortions of the "official" conspiracy theory regarding this one assault on America's security and freedoms does not delve deeply enough into the root of the current crises. And I say "crises," in the plural, because we are swiftly and inexorably racing toward a multitude of interconnected crises, none of which is at this point entirely preventable and from which a new epoch of human civilization will emerge. These include the rise and fall of the New American Empire, the coming collapse of the dollar, the cresting of Hubbard's peak (peak oil), global climate change, a global freshwater shortage, a global food crisis, and accelerating political and social instability secondary to all the above.

Reflecting on Vermont's 2005 Legislative Session: Choose Your Metaphor

By Rick Foley and Ellen Hayes

Vermonters are dealing with all sorts of issues: skyrocketing energy and healthcare costs, debatable risk-benefits of GMOs, farmer-liability protections, safety of dry-cask nuclear waste storage, big-box stores, quarrying and deploying windmills on mountain tops, and the deployment of the Vermont National Guard overseas. The list goes on. As the 18 Windham County groups outlined in their tough questioning of the Democratic leadership on July 11th, the 2005 session of the Vermont State Legislature failed to pass legislation protecting the public's health, safety, and welfare relative to four of these issues, despite an elected Democratic majority whom many Vermonters thought would come to the rescue.