Downsize the State: Nothing Succeeds Like Secession

The good people at the Second Vermont Republic are at it again, helping to organize The Third Statewide Convention on Vermont Self-Determination, with a keynote address by Morris Berman (Why America Failed).

The convention will be held in the Vermont State House, Montelier, VT, on Saturday 14 September, 2012, from 9AM ro 4PM (party afterwards!).

Occupy Secession has this to say:

Only in Vermont would it be possible to hold a statewide convention on political independence in the House Chamber of the State House, where the Governor, the Lt. Governor, Council of State, Congressional Delegation, and the vast majority of the members of the State Legislature are all unconditional apologists for the American Empire and vehemently opposed to Vermont separatism. Yet that is precisely what is about to happen in Montpelier, Vermont on September 14th. Not only that, it is the third such convention, the other two having been held in 2005 and 2008. There is no charge for the use of the most prestigious venue in the entire Green Mountain State, because it happens to be the People’s House....

At the end of the meeting convention delegates will be invited to consider endorsing The Montpelier Manifesto calling for the rejection of the immoral, corrupt, decaying, dying, failing American Empire as well as its rapid and peaceful dissolution. Not unlike the 1963 Port Huron Statement issued by the Students for a Democratic Society, The Montpelier Manifesto is aimed at all citizens of the United States, not just those living in Vermont.

Judging by Google, that Monpelier Manifesto is all over the place, including at the Second Vermont Republic (here). Here's the preamble:

We, citizens of this American land, haunted by the nihilism of separation, meaninglessness, and powerlessness, subsumed by political elites who use corporate, state, and military power to manipulate our lives, pawns of a global system of dominance and deceit in which transnational megacompanies and big government control us through money, markets, and media, sapping our political will, civil liberties, collective memory, traditional cultures, sustainability, and independence, and as victims of affluenza, technomania, cybermania, globalism, and imperialism, do issue and proclaim this

Document of Grievances and Abuses

Which is organized as 29 charges under seven headings: Governance, Economy, Foreign Policy, Civil Liberties, Criminal Justice, Social Services, and Infrastructure.

The manifesto is signed by

Thomas H. Naylor

Kirkpatrick Sale

James Starkey

Charles Keil

Thomas H. Naylor is Founder of the Second Vermont Republic and Professor Emeritus of Economics at Duke University.

Kirkpatrick Sale is the author of Human Scale and eleven other books and is Director of the Middlebury Institute.

James Starkey is Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Rhode Island.

Charles Keil is Professor Emeritus of American Studies at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and the author of Urban Blues.