Will Vermont Secede from the Union?
<http://www.alternet.org/story/50056/>

By Ian Baldwin <http://www.alternet.org/authors/8283/> and Frank Bryan
<http://www.alternet.org/authors/8284/> , The Washington Post. Posted
April 3, 2007
<http://www.alternet.org/ts/archives/?date[F]=04&date[Y]=2007&date[d]=03
&act=Go/> .

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
cινιℓ ωαr 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 <http://www.vtcommons.org/> , 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.