SC99-4

http://www.vtcommons.org/journal/2009/11/editorial-beyond-baracks-bamboozling-obamamania-fizzles-vermonters-take-fresh-look-i

Beyond Barack's Bamboozling - As Obamamania Fizzles, Vermonters Take A Fresh Look At Independence

Turn back the clock for a moment. It was one year ago this month that the majority of U.S. voters (if corporately-owned voting machine counts are to be believed) threw their weight behind a presidential candidate who promised to push the “reset button” and jump-start the United States Empire.

My favorite joke of last fall: Who was the loneliest person in the United States the day after the Obama election?

A Vermont secessionist.

Even funnier is the constant drumbeating about Obama the “progressive,” the “liberal,” the “Democrat,” which is about as accurate as calling Obama a “socialist,” a “Communist” or a “terrorist”.

Pundits from both the left and the right have completely missed the point of the already-stale “Obama phenomenon.” Obama is simply the new chauffeur, the newest driver of the getaway car that is the U.S. Empire.

In a stunning new book entitled Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (Paradigm Publishers, 2009 - reviewed this season at our web site), historian and journalist Paul Street meticulously uncovers the media-manufactured mythology that has cloaked “Brand Obama” these past several years.

His conclusion about the man mainstream liberals (and 70 percent of Vermont voters) pinned their “hope” for “change” on?

“Obama,” he writes, “stands to the conservative business-and-empire-friendly side of majority U.S. opinion on key issues like national health insurance, campaign finance, trade, Iraq, and foreign relations in general.”

No surprise to our readers – but a wake-up call to those who pinned their hopes on Mr. O.

The Commander In Speech’s brilliance, of course, lies in his use of carefully cultivated rhetoric designed to convince attentive audiences that he is at least paying “lip service” attention to national problems (witness the so-called national health care “debate”) or global crises (climate change and Peak Oil come to mind).

But, with his Harvard/Columbia pedigree, his huge financial and political base of support among the multinational banksters, and his “professorial” demeanor (long on words, short on action), Obama knows better than most that none of these deeply rooted structural problems is ever going to be solved by Establishment imperial interests who seek to profit from exploiting these crises. The United States is an Empire that is simply too big, too corrupt, and too much governed by entrenched interests to respond to the needs and desires of its citizens.Perhaps the most compelling evidence of Obama's empty rhetoric? His passage of the largest imperial Pentagon "Defense" budget ($680 billion) in U.S. history, just 3 weeks after winning the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize.

“Disaster capitalism,” in other words, trumps “the audacity of hope.”

And that is why Vermont Commons: Voices of Independence is here. To remind Vermonters that our 21st-century future is shaping up to look very different from our past, and that the pursuit of economic decentralization, non-violent secession, and political independence for our once-and-future republic is in our best interest.

A return to our first principles:

We at Vermont Commons believe that the United States is no longer a republic governed by its citizens, but an Empire that is essentially ungovernable.

We believe that a sovereign state's right to nonviolently secede, first championed in the United States by the citizens of 19th century New England, is a right that demands re-exploration in the 21st century.

We believe that a 21st century Vermont, working in concert with our neighbors and the rest of the world, may better be able to feed, power, educate and care for its citizens as an independent 21st century republic than as one of fifty states within the U.S. Empire, given the new century's emerging realities: climate change, global peak oil, and an "endless war on terror" for "full-spectrum dominance" being waged by the U.S. government for geo-strategic control of the world's remaining fossil fuel energy resources.

Our vision for 2010 and beyond is to remain in statewide print publication six times per year, and to continue our efforts to pioneer a new and sustainable model for 21st century independent multimedia journalism.

Elements of our emerging model include

1. Our Not-For-Profit Approach: We see our news journal as a nonprofit “statewide multimedia coffeehouse,” not a commercially run for-profit business.

2. Our Place-Based “Commons” Focus: We are focused on the goings-on of a single place – Vermont – and its relationship with the rest of the world, with a specific focus on breathing life back into idea of “the Commons.”

3. Our Civically Minded and Solutions-Oriented Content: We seek out writers and ask them to submit their work as unpaid citizen journalists, chronicling solutions-oriented work being done by Vermonters across the state.

4. Our Fiercely Subjective Yet Non-Partisan Politics: We make no pretense to “Objectivity.” Instead, we are modeling ourselves after 19th-century republican newspapers in the new U.S. republic – we have a definite point of view. But we balance this with a non-partisan approach, seeing ourselves as a “big tent” for a variety of voices from a variety of political perspectives – liberal, conservative, progressive, libertarian, and decentralist/mutualist.

5. Our Collaborative Funding Model: As a not-for-profit, we rely on funding from generous individuals, subscriptions, and advertising from like-minded businesses and nonprofits............