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Editorial: Empire's Fall - Walking Towards A New Vermont

Editorial: Empire's Fall - Walking Towards A New Vermont

Submitted by Rob Williams on Sun, 10/29/2006 - 10:46pm.

Empire's Fall: Walking Towards A New Vermont

Five years ago this past September, key members of the U.S. intelligence and political elite successfully orchestrated the most powerful “false flag” operation in modern world history. Nineteen Arab “terrorists” – individuals trained, funded, and armed from within the United States empire's own largely secretive intelligence networks – took the blame for the World Trade Center towers' collapse and the deaths of more than 3,000 individuals. The subsequent “shock and awe” engendered by the 9/11 attacks has generated a whole host of consequences, including the launching of a “war on terror” with no end and the curtailing of civil liberties here at home, and the militant expansion of the U.S. empire's policy of “full spectrum dominance” as it wages resource wars and practices “disaster capitalism” throughout the world.

Or so many thoughtful journalists, scientists, theologians and independent investigators claim, in close to one dozen exhaustively researched and carefully sourced books that are routinely ignored by the editors at CNN, “The Nation,” FOX, and the “New York Times.”

What could possibly justify U.S.-based imperial elites even contemplating attacking ordinary American citizens? Many motives exist, but perhaps such desperation is best understood by considering the emerging “trifecta” of seemingly intractable problems that threaten U.S. global hegemony: human-induced planetary climate change, global Peak Oil (the increasing scarcity of cheap and abundant fossil fuel energy), and the impending implosion of a corporate economy fueled by Petro-Dollars. The many faces of the so-called “war on terror” offer a 24/7 convenient smoke screen for these “inconvenient truths,” ones that we ignore at our own peril.

And, to borrow a phrase from Vermonter Eugene Jarecki's award-winning 2005 documentary “Why We Fight:”

“Nowhere is it written that the U.S. Empire will last forever.”

It is our Empire's fall, and this autumn season for contemplating peaceable secession from the United States – and the creation of an independent Vermont republic - is upon us.

This past Labor Day week-end, Vermonters by the hundreds did something unprecedented in the history of the modern world.

They walked, in solidarity, on behalf of a cleaner energy future.

Some walked for just a few hours.

Others spent a full five days on the road from Robert Frost's home in Ripton to Burlington's Battery Park.

There, at the eastern edge of the country's sixth largest body of water, they asked Vermont's national political candidates – Welch and Rainville, Tarrant and Sanders – to sign a pledge to reduce greenhouse gases.

It was a remarkable, even heroic event, made more so because it was conceived and organized in just four weeks' time, and received an enthusiastic response from Vermonters who traveled from all over the state simply to participate in what may go down in history as a historic moment, a week-end when Vermont sent a message to the rest of the United States, and the world.

Human-induced global warming is real.

Climate change matters.

And we can and must do something to address it.

Having had a small hand in organizing the WALC (Walking for Action Locally on Climate Change), I listened from the back of the Battery Park crowd - one thousand Vermonters of all political persuasions - as, one by one, each candidate made a great show of signing the pledge and then committed their allotted five minutes of political speechifying.

And I suddenly realized that perhaps we were asking the wrong people to sign.

We live in a national society marked by corporate corruption, a bought-out and broken two-party system, massive electoral fraud, ongoing “disaster capitalism,” rampant militarism, 24/7 media disinformation, and endless war. In such a debased political culture, not surprisingly, most politicians follow, but rarely lead. While our U.S. Congressional candidates here in Vermont have spent more than $15 million on their election campaigns, the most experienced among them – Bernie Sanders – admits in public, over and over again, that the federal government, including the U.S. Congress corrupt to the core.

Faced with all of these unpleasant observations, we Vermonters can continue to live in denial, or agree to comply with the rules laid out by the Empire, or convince ourselves that reform of the imperial system is possible.

Or all of us here in Vermont can, in the face of the U.S. Empire's fall, sign a new pledge.

Call it the “Vermont Independence” pledge.

Instead of looking to our political leaders to solve our problems, we can begin walking the walk towards a more independent Vermont right now.

Every time we plant and nurture our own gardens and greenhouses; build and tend our chicken coops and root cellars: co-invest, with our neighbors, in a local CSA (community-supported agriculture) project; or embrace the “localvore” ethic of eating within a one hundred mile radius of our homes, we increase our capacity for “food sovereignty” and “food security.”