And hear our most excellent home-grown, all-Vermont Funk band, Electric Sorcery !! Playing 2:00 PM at the historic Gathering Inn, Hancock, Vermont !

The doors of sound have been ripped off the hinges by Electric Sorcery who routinely electrify Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. Towns are regularly woken out of their slumber by the by the wicked sound of this power trio.

Electric Sorcery takes psychedelic music firmly rooted in the 70s and adds their own special twist. Funky rhythms and psychedelic guitar riffs come together to create an intriguing sound that is sometimes very heavy.... This is a fun listen and anyone who gravitates towards the psychedelic sounds of the 70s needs to hear this… - SeaOfTranquility.org 

Meet & Eat    Greet & Drink

Saturday, September 25, from 2 – 4 PM  

1295 Route 100

Diagonally opposite the Hancock Hotel

Please bring your concerns, your hard questions, and your ideas.  The Independent vision for Vermont is all about you, your families and communities !

by Jane Dwinell

The great Liberty Street Yard Sale is now over for 2010. This fabulous Montpelier institution provides bargains and a chance to meet and greet your neighbors. Nearly every house has goods for sale, and the street becomes a serious traffic jam about 10 o'clock. It seems like everyone has too much stuff they don't need (yet could really use some of those items their neighbors don't want: the trash-to-treasure paradox of the yard sale!).

If Vermont were to secede from the United States of Empire and become an independent nation-state, how could it possibly survive as a separate republic? How would it function? Are there any examples of smaller, sustainable nation-states which might serve as a role model for a state like Vermont, should it decide to leave the Union?

Gov. Jim Douglas regularly asserts that raising taxes on the wealthy is likely to drive the wealthy to leave the state. Twice in the last several months, I've heard him asked to provide statistical evidence that this is true. Both times he demurred, referring instead to a conversation he had once and to statistics about the total loss of population from Vermont (irrespective of wealth).

There was good reason for him to duck the question: Apparently the statistics that exist show either no evidence that raising taxes on high earners leads them to flee a state or that total revenue gains far and away offset any revenue losses from those who do move away. Dylan Matthews summarizes a literature review by the Center for Budget and Policy Prioriites (h/t Matt Yglesias).

Update: CollapseNet is Live ! 

http://collapsenet.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1042...

We are not ineffective, we are not few in number. You are not alone. 

TWEET: #CollapseNet #Vermont #VTGov #Montp #TransitionTown  

Folks,

This will be a way for individuals, families and communities who are building lifeboats in Vermont, to connect, share information and expertise, teach, learn and reskill.

Please pass this on. If you are on Twitter, please tweet the ablve links with the hashtag #CollapseNet.

Here’s the press release:

• http://www.collapsenet.com
• http://www.collapsenetwork.com
• http://www.collapsenet.net

May 21, 2010 – CollapseNet ™, a long-anticipated new effort from internationally-recognized author, lecturer and activist Michael C. Ruppert, will officially launch on Tuesday June 8, 2010. The site will be a first-of-its-kind effort to promote the rapid and focused sharing of information between millions around the world who are preparing for the collapse of human industrial civilization – The Lifeboat Movement.

This is a blow to Vermont liberals, lefties and democrats who have buried their heads in the sand to keep pretending that their Obama walks on water, folks who have buried any and all opposition to the ongoing wars, torture and domestic loss of liberties in exchange for a smile and a promise of 'change'. The Left can't ignore the only recently announced White House approval for a controversial expansion of offshore oil exploration. And now, in an ecological catastrophe of global proportions, the feds are even slower to respond, than the Bush Administration responded to Katrina. The Black Swan was popularised by Nassim Taleb in his recent book by that name. Taleb regards almost all major scientific discoveries, historical events, and artistic accomplishments as 'black swans'—undirected and unpredicted. He gives the rise of the Internet, the personal computer, World War I, and the September 11, 2001 attacks as examples of Black Swan events.The Black Swan has its origins in a centuries-old scientific assumption that ‘All swans are white'. Just because nobody but Australian aborigines saw them until recently.To me, the Black Swan Event is a catastrophe that causes a chain reaction, in a world of global energy and food dependencies. It relieves the tension of that which is ready and waiting to happen, but hasn't happened. Academic snobs don't see it, but are experts at covering their tracks, afterward. Party politicians can't see it and even if they could, it's not within their daily protocol of memorised answers to pre-arranged questions by the mainstream media.The 'tension' is Peak Oil, if you haven't heard of it here's what it's about. Once that tension is released, centrally planned economies such as the fiat currency and debt-based US Empire simply break down. The centralised nanny-state with drones checking for protesters productive workers born in Mexico & pot plants (as despair, domestic violence & rape multiplies) simply doesn't work. The USSR disintegrated overnight. All empires go... once whatever dependency it was that fuelled its overstretch... goes. The tension... releases.What remains are localised economies based on minimal energy usage, the way the human race lived for most of its existence. Vermont is one hopeful example of a small, governable entity. Vermont was a independent republic until 1791. We can be free again! Imagine Free Vermont, and vote for Dennis Steele for Governor. Engage in, and promote, local food production.So what's the Black Swan? It's all over the newspapers, predictable in hindsight, but strikes to the heart of the Empires energy plans. The bastards will have to invade Venezuela now (at the very least, maybe Bolivia for good measure), just to continue fuelling the military overstretch, hundreds of bases worldwide, and the never-ending wars. All of which consume approximately half the oil said to be consumed by the US. Think of it, half the oil! This is the Empire's next move: US builds up its bases in oil-rich South AmericaFrom the Caribbean to Brazil, political opposition to US plans for 'full-spectrum operations' is escalating rapidlyThe rest of this post I dedicate to Michael Ruppert, whom I just interviewed for Montpelier's local paper, The Bridge. Ruppert will be touring Vermont in May, screening his film Collapse and dealing with questions and concerns from audiences. This tour is sponsored by Chelsea Green Publishing, the Vermont Independent Candidates, Radio Free Vermont, Vermont Transition Towns, and others:

• May 13 – Burlington Contois Auditorium, City Hall 7:30 p.m.
• May 14 – Montpelier Unitarian Church, 7:30 p.m.
• May 15 – Brattleboro Brattleboro Union High School, 7:30 p.m.
• May 16 – Woodstock Woodstock Town Hall Theater, 7:00 p.m. Features screening of film and Q&A with Michael Ruppert afterward

Click here for more information on the tour!'The oil slick is now the size of Delaware. It will be Ohio-sized within days. Florida has declared a state of emergency. All commercial fishing in the Gulf is threatened. All widlife is threatened. And when and if the slick gets to NOLA it will have a disatarous impact on energy production and the brave, battered, courageous people who live there. Coastal refineries may have to close... What might happen if the oil ignited? Oil should be at $100 before the end of next week. I suspect between $150 and $200 (maybe higher) this summer.'Worse: Napolitano and Salazar are already talking about huge claim funds. Massive class-actions against BP are starting. Insurance claims may well dwarf Katrina. The economy of the entire Gulf Coast is in jeopardy. From what I heard there is no real plan to stop the leak and no estimation as to when that will happen. (I might have missed that.) What happens when the slick hits Cuba? The rest of the Caribbean?'The current fradulent Wall Street bubble will pop in shorter order than anticipated.'Within about a week, man's greed and reach for energy have found natural and unyielding limits. Two coal mine disasters and an oil slick that will cause as yet unknown catastrophic damage, loss of life and property. And yet there are still those in this movement who think we need to argue with people who believe there's plenty of easy oil about anything.'It would be so poetic if history recorded that this was the event that marked the cliff edge of human industrial civilization. Maybe then someone will get the point. Maybe then we will find our hundredth monkey... And maybe Mother Earth will have poisoned us with the substance we have so greedily raped her -- and killed each other -- for... You want oil?... I'll give you oil.' 

Vermont Yankee Radioactive Plume

This week, Peter Shumlin, President Pro Tem of the Vermont State Senate, announced that the Senate will vote on whether Vermont Yankee should be closed on schedule.

The first vote will be this week and the final vote will be next week! After years of work by thousands of Vermonters, this is it!

Click here to send a message to your Senator.

Do you know who will deliver the keynote speech at NOFA, the Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont this weekend? A Monsanto man who was put in charge of the USDA. Yet another case of the fox entrusted to guard the hen house. Remember James Watt?

This is a slap-in-the-face to every small farmer in Vermont.

Today I learned that I have been censored from asking any questions in the staged Q&A session after the Monsanto keynote speech.

A day after listening to Obama's cliches, vague talk about what ails us, and his hard clasping onto our tired old misdirected values and nonsolutions, I was rather surprised to read what the French president Sarkozy said in the opening address of the G20 World Economic Forum at Davos. This is after all the gathering of the world's top capitalists and globalizers. Moreover, in the French political scene, Sarkozy is the "right winger" whose election was a sore point with leftists there, to the point of strikes and riots. And yet, he apparently has both the brains, and the political breathing room, to make statements that Obama would not dare to utter. The annotated excerpts below will demonstrate the kind of re-thinking that the Western world desperately needs, but that the American Empire is least able to contemplate. I am not bringing Sarkozy up as the best thinker and talker on these issues, but rather as an anti-hero who is drawn into, and able, to bring up these issues that are forbidden by Obama's puppetmasters. Sarkozy also threw in the obligatory nice words about capitalism, globalization, finance, and the G20 institution, and he lied about what happened in Copenhagen, but that didn't stop him from clearly stating his main points.

Yes, in the world of tomorrow, we must again reckon with citizens, with the demands of morality, the demands of responsibility, the demands of dignity for citizens. We must see this not as yet another problem, but as part of the solution; not as an additional difficulty, but as something healthy and virtuous, that may, perhaps, allow us to feel happier with what we are, happier with what we accomplish.

Why, in the midst of Collapse, is North Dakota relatively unaffected? Why are foreclosures and job losses not keeping pace with the rest of the Empire?

One good reason is that the people of North Dakota have their own Bank. Vermont desperately needs such a bank, and yesterday.

I see businesses in Vermont failing because of infrastructure failure and decay, not just due to the financial collapse. My Aunt in Richmond can't go to a local greengrocer anymore, but must drive to a  distant supermarket.  Because the banks weren't local enough to care to lend the greengrocer enough money to keep its doors open, when the town bridge was closed for maintenence.

A Bank of Vermont could've allowed the greengrocer and other area businesses to stay open.  The buildings would not be boarded up, with the absentee landowners and Wall Street the only people still making a living. The employees would still be working. Former customers would not be polluting their way to a distant supermarket. 

And now Montpelier are going to pay $200k to a demolition firm to blow up the only bridge across Lake Champlain.  Without a replacement, without an economic plan.  The problem of capital flow, the lack of a Vermont Bank, the failure of our representatives has just been expanded.  The ripple effects of this are reaching all over my homeland of Vermont, and beyond.

Do you favour the creation of a Bank of Vermont? Independent candidates in the next Vermont election do! Just ask them. And then vote for them. Watch for the public announcement of the Independents in Montpelier on January 15th!

Democratic/Republican candidates avoid this issue: whom do they really represent? You, or the big corporate banks? If you believe that Morgan Stanley and Bank of America have Vermont's own interests at heart, vote for the Donkeyphant. If you believe that the role of your representatives is to allocate borrowed stimulus money, you can stand under the Donkeyphant's hind legs and test the trickle-down theory.

The following article was written by Ellen Brown, the author of Web of Debt, and appeared in the Huffington Post.

Job Losses? Not in North Dakota. A Stimulus Plan That Really Works