An Anti-War Secessionist Movement

The concept of secession may be in its infancy but it is a message to be added to the mix. Coming from an unlikely source, Time covers the Vermont anti-empire movement. Although it's a fair article, don't underestimate the MSM to not have an agenda behind the news. After all, it was Time that named the criminal Ben Bernanke as 'Person of the Year.'


Excerpts from The Secessionist Campaign for the Republic of Vermont.

On Jan. 15, in the state capital of Montpelier, nine candidates for statewide office gathered in a tiny room at the Capitol Plaza Hotel, to announce they wanted a divorce from the United States of America. "For the first time in over 150 years, secession and political independence from the U.S. will be front and center in a statewide New England political campaign," said Thomas Naylor, 73, one of the leaders of the campaign.A former Duke University economics professor, Naylor heads up the Second Vermont Republic, which he describes as "left-libertarian, anti-big government, anti-empire, antiwar, with small is beautiful as our guiding philosophy." The group advocates the peaceful secession of Vermont.

According to a 2007 poll, they have support from at least 13% of state voters. The campaign slogan, Naylor told me, is "Imagine Free Vermont." In his fondest imaginings, Naylor said, Vermonters would not be "forced to participate in killing women and children in the Middle East."

Second Vermont Republic's gubernatorial candidate is Dennis Steele, 42, who says that, if elected, his first act in office would be to bring home Vermont's National Guard from overseas deployments. "I see my kids going off to fight in wars for empire 10, 15, 20 years from now."

"People in Vermont in general are very antiwar, and all their faith was in Obama to end the wars. I ask people, 'Did you get the change you wanted?' They can't even look you in the eyes. We live in a nation that is asleep at the wheel and where the hearts are growing cold like ice."Steele and the secessionists have nothing but contempt for Vermont Senators Bernie Sanders and Patrick Leahy, who are otherwise considered among the most liberal members of Congress. "They've done nothing to stop the wars," says Steele flatly. Thomas Naylor was more pointed: "Every time a Vermonter serving in the National Guard gets deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, likely to be hurt or killed, Bernie and Patrick are there to commemorate the departure and have pictures taken."

The U.S. government, they said, was an immoral enterprise — engaged in imperial wars, propping up corrupt bankers and supersized corporations, crushing small businessmen, plundering the tax-base for corporate welfare, snooping on the private lives of citizens — and they wanted no more part of it. "The gods of the empire," Steele told the room, "are not the gods of Vermont."

An independent Vermont, the group believes, would expolit its already highly developed local small-scale agriculture, its "locavore" farm exchanges, with a tax structure reformed to incentivize small business and industry (and to make life difficult for large out-of-state corporations). By 2020, they foresee Vermont producing at least 75% of its own electricity and heat, using wind-, solar-, biomass- and hydro-power. They want to establish a Bank of Vermont owned by the people of Vermont — freed from the arbitrary controls of central bankers — as well as a local alternative currency, with Vermont pension and operating funds invested not in Wall Street but in locally owned financial institutions. "We favor devolution of political power from the state back to local communities, making the governing structure for towns, schools, hospitals and social services much like that of small, decentralized states like Switzerland," declares the group's "21st Century Statement of Principles." {more}

Veterans Today weighs in with It begins. An Anti-War Secessionist Movement is alive.

This is what happens when our nation continually engages in these ridiculous and unnecessary wars overseas without taking into account the wishes of her citizens.

This is what happens when Amerika places money and potential power grabs overseas ahead of the wishes of the people and instead caters to the whims of the military industrial complex, the emerging market manipulators, the war industry captains, the energy cartels and any other group that the Supreme Court has now given the powers of citizenship.

It is no accident that this is now public knowledge throughout the nation after the Supreme Court decided that money rules our political system.

No it does not.

We now face serious attempts at secession from citizens who have no intention of being ignored by the central government and its manipulting, puppet-master elites who constantly have access to the levers of power, regardless of the will of the citizens at large.

Fascism in our country is now facing a viable and growing citizens’ anti-war and secessionist movement willing to finance candidates who support state secession and an anti-war platform.

We are talking about civil war ultimately if this carries through to its logical end.

Does Washington D.C. understand this?

This is the ultimate result of generation upon generation of rule by the elites, rule by the Robber Barons, rule of money and its supposed power over the will of the people. One man, one vote cannot be ignored forever.

Money and its power is meaningless in this situation if civil war ensues because aware citizens realize that they have been preempted by money, power, position and ignorance of what it means to carry the burdens of working class America.

Don’t anybody ever say that I did not say for years, “I told you so!”

The chickens are coming home to roost. {more}

Michael Chute .....

"We ain't right wing, we ain't left wing. We're trying to get the folks to see the problem ain't left versus right, it's up versus down." He uses a tool analogy. "A Republican is a standard screw," said Chute. "A Democrat is a Philips screws. So whichever way you vote you get the screw."

The Second Vermont Republic is a nonviolent citizens' network and think tank opposed to the tyranny of Corporate America and the U.S. government, and committed to the peaceful return of Vermont to its status as an independent republic and more broadly the dissolution of the Union. {more}

At this point in time most Americans will scoff at the idea of secession. Give it a little more time. The ideas are being planted.