Live on CSPAN! Dr. Paul is in his element; check it out.
July 7, 2009
An older essay.
A really excellent discussion on the Green Mountain Daily reminded me that I’d written this essay a while ago when I was thinking a lot about the role of history (and listening to a lot of Utah Phillips) in peoples’ identities.
*NOTE: This essay reflects my thinking a few months ago, and my own present beliefs are likely slightly different than those expressed by the self who wrote this essay. It’s mostly me, though 
*
The Long Memory and the Philadelphia System
By Matthew Cropp
The late Wobbly folk musician U. Utah Phillips often commented that “the long memory is the most radical idea in America.” If, according to Phillips, we view history as one long stream rather than a series of independent crises, the way the world of the present appears profoundly shifts. The atrocities, movements, and swindles of the past cease to be isolated events to learn the “facts” of, and instead become integral pieces of our perception of the world we live in today. This view of our past fosters in people a sense of agency, as history becomes what is happening now rather than just what was happening then. History becomes something that people make happen, rather than something that happens to people.
However, this view of history is not embraced by modern American culture. Rather, as Phillips put it in a 2004 interview with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, “that long memory has been taken away from us…You haven’t got it in you schools. You’re not getting it on your television. You’re not getting it anywhere. You’re being leapfrogged from one crisis to the next…you can’t remember what happened last week, because you’re locked into this week’s crisis.”
One result of this process is that many people in our society have lost touch with the meaning of our political traditions. In today’s history classrooms, the objective lies in students’ ability to regurgitate predetermined rote facts, rather than in constructing ideas and forming insights. Thus, when our kids learn about the American government in school (a process that I experienced in the not too distant past), it becomes simply one more structure about which they must learn a list of facts. Just as this mindset applied universally alienates people from the historical process as a whole, applied specifically to our political traditions it alienates people from our government and civic institutions. It allows people to lose sight of the fact that they are structures which were created by real actors making profoundly historically impactful choices, whose intentions must be investigated and understood if we are to fully grasp the meaning of the world our ancestors built and we inhabit.
The American system (ultimately codified in the U.S. Constitution) was not crafted in a vacuum, but was profoundly influenced by the experiences and beliefs of its makers. These were worldly men who, looking to Europe, were profoundly aware of the many forms tyranny could take, and had put their lives on the line to gain independence in the Revolutionary War. It has become fashionable recently in “radical” historical circles to emphasize the conservative sides of the Revolution, including the retention of slavery, the restriction of the franchise, and the fortunes made by the founders. All these critiques are valid, but they do not negate the incredibly radical parts of the Revolution. In Emma Goldman’s early 20th century magazine Mother Earth, Voltarine de Cleyre described this radical side: “the real Revolution was a change in political institutions which should make government not a thing apart…but a serviceable agent, responsible, economical, and trustworthy (but never so much trusted as not to be continuously watched), for the transaction of such business as was the common concern, and to set the limits of the common concern at the line where one man’s liberty would encroach upon another’s.”
The founders had seen tyranny and wanted to craft a system that would preserve liberty. Not grant liberty, which they believed was inherent to the very nature of the human being, but prevent the development of tyrannical systems that would restrict peoples’ natural state of freedom. The Constitution and the American system must be interpreted with that intention in mind, and when it is, the call for Vermont’s independence transforms from a seemingly radical departure from the “American Way” into a rare gesture of deep respect to the intentions of America’s founders that have been increasingly forgotten as our people have been “leapfrogged from one crisis to the next.”
My own understanding of the intentions of the founders of the United States has been profoundly deepened by my recent chance encounter with an article entitled, “The Philadelphian system: sovereignty, arms control, and balance of power in the American states-union, circa 1787-1861”, by Daniel H. Deudney, while visiting a friend in New Haven, Connecticut. The article is as dense as its title is wordy, but after wading through it I emerged clutching a vital new concept, “negarchy”. Deudney defines negarchy as “the arrangement of institutions necessary to prevent simultaneously the emergence of hierarchy and anarchy”, and if this sounds vaguely familiar, it should. That’s because we were taught about this concept in American Government all those years ago, albeit with an incredibly important omission and a different name. It was termed “checks and balances”, and we learned of it as a horizontal division of power between the three branches of the Federal Government. Because of this, we were told, no one branch could gain supremacy over the other two, and as a result America was safe from tyranny.
Alas, that’s only half the story, according to Deudney’s: the intended checks and balances were not only horizontal but vertical. In addition to the tension between the branches of the Federal government, a system of tension was implemented between the Federal Government, the sovereign States, and the armed people. This network of vertically and horizontally distributed power was intended to create a system that could draw upon the whole network to defend itself from external threats, but would become horribly snarled up should any piece of it try to become internally hegemonic and tyrannical.
Deudney’s study ends appropriately in 1861; the year the Civil War began. The Civil War spelled the beginning of the end of the American experiment in negarchy as the sovereignty of the States was nullified by the Federal government through force of arms. By expropriating the States’ right the leave the Union, the Federal government transformed the status of the State from equal to subservient to the Federal Government, and power and responsibility have been continuously flowing from state capitals to Washington ever since.
The justification for many Americans’ pride in our country is that we have the best, freest system in the world. However, when looking at our system with the “long memory”, we must acknowledge that it has been slowly degenerating and is now far from what its founders intended. While many people quarrel over whether or not the checks and balances within the Federal Government are deteriorating, they forget the very existence of the vertical checks which have deteriorated to the point where to suggest an assertion of state sovereignty to counter Federal tyranny is either considered treasonous or absurd.
The degeneration of the American system is both discouraging and tragic, but for those of us with long memories, I believe it is worth fighting to help others remember its intended role. To do so would revive peoples’ sense of themselves as actors in the stream of history, and would bring legitimacy to the cause of utilizing Vermont’s state sovereignty as a method to resist our government’s economic and foreign policy shortsightedness and irrationality. A population of people with long memories would transform the independence movement from a fringe populated by the disaffected into a political and social force to be reckoned with. To accomplish this, I see a few ways forward. These tactics are by no means exhaustive, and many more can be found in the pages of the Vermont Commons.
In journalism and politics, we should endeavor to frame State/Federal relations as oppositional. When questioning candidates for state office we should ask them what important powers the State of Vermont has and what they will do in their prospective roles as elected officials to prevent the Federal Government from encroaching upon them. If independence minded Vermonters decide to run for office, they should make the preservation and reclamation of State power from the Federal Government a cornerstone of their campaigns. At the moment people have been trained to view the relationship between the Federal Government and the States as that of master to servant; the Federal Government gives block grants to the States and the States administer them, changing their laws to conform to the various strings attached. As a result, all most people hear about is the two entities working together, and thus perceive that relationship to be the natural order of things. If an oppositional rather than cooperative relationship is regularly introduced to public discourse, the question of State versus Federal power might be reopened in many minds.
Such strategies might bring somewhat greater legitimacy to the independence platform in the short term by helping people to identify an erstwhile forgotten dynamic of the American system, but in and of itself lay the foundation for a long-term shift in attitudes. What is needed to effect that is a wholesale revival of the Long Memory in the people of Vermont. For independence activists the immediate gratification of working towards this might not be apparent, as it will not instantly create roving bands of hard-line secessionists. Instead, it will foster individuals who can engage meaningfully with our past and see themselves as actors rather than as passive objects within the stream of history. As a critical mass of people seeing history as a forward- rather than backward-looking process grows, the number of people willing to engage with the idea of secession within both the contexts past and present will expand concurrently. The task of convincing them that independence is the right answer for the present circumstances would remain, but folks with long memories would be able to listen to and consider the arguments rather than simply regurgitating the “fact” that the Civil War answered the question of secession and calling anyone who disputes that crazy. Until we can overcome that latter mindset, the secession movement can never grow beyond a fringe because only a fringe of people are willing to honestly engage with the subject.
It’s easy to abstractly call for a revival of historical consciousness in the whole population of a state, but how might we accomplish it? Most people don’t have the time or resources to become professional historians, and those historians seem to spend far more time uncovering esoteric historical minutiae and debating amongst themselves than they do spreading an appreciation of history to the larger society. As such, people who want to see a revival of the long memory shouldn’t look for much guidance from on high in the ivory tower, but should instead begin the process of reconstructing the pasts of the institutions of their daily lives.
A brief example of what I mean can be found in my workplace, which was unionized at some point in the 1980s. Our contract came up for negotiation this year, and we realized that, as a group, we couldn’t even remember the nature of our proposals to management from when the previous contract was negotiated a mere three years ago. We did a bit of digging and talked to the old representative, and gradually got a sense for what has transpired in previous negotiations. In the process, we as a group got a feel for where the organization has been, what how it has changed over time, and what sorts of struggles have emerged again and again. As a result of this process, our perception of our union deepened, and our negotiations were re-framed from a wrangle over the conditions of the moment to one more event in a long historical continuum that has many past parallels. The difference between this mindset and the mindset which can engage with the call for independence is merely one of scale; the processes are virtually identical.
Therefore I call on all independence minded Vermonters to begin the process of reclaiming the past in their own lives. Start the process of remembering where your work, union, church, school, and family have come from, and share that process with those with whom you share those institutions. In the short term, the benefits are great, as knowing the origins of the things in your life can profoundly deepen your understanding of both those things themselves, as well as your relationship to them. In the long term, however, the benefits are even greater. In the process of providing the opportunity for those around you to understand their history, you’ll be helping to rebuild a responsible, thoughtful citizenry who can honestly and competently engage with the problems of our crumbling Republic.
July 6, 2009
Tax Time: Why Vermonters in an Independent Republic Would Pay Lower Taxes
The myth of Federal Benefits
It is sometimes claimed that, under the current US Federal Government, Vermont is a “beneficiary state,” that is, a state that receives more in benefits from the federal government than it pays in federal taxes. According to data collected by the Tax Foundation, a private Washington organization that analyzes tax policies, Vermont receives $1.08 in federal expenditures for every dollar that Vermonters pay in federal taxes (based on data for the tax year 2005, a typical year before the current economic meltdown).
However, this number is misleading, because the feds inflict on us not only the ostensible yearly taxes, but also a huge hidden deficit. The income taxes and other taxes we pay are not sufficient to cover expenditures, and each year the federal government runs a deficit, increasing the US national debt. This debt is effectively an extra, deferred tax, which we owe and will have to pay in the future, with interest.
Your generous Uncle Sam, in other words, pretends to give you more money than you pay him in taxes. But he is taking you for a sleigh ride. He conveniently forgets to tell you that all this extra cash comes from IOUs on which he has put your signature. He isn’t giving you his money, but merely your own – and, of course, he pockets some of it.
In its calculations, the Tax Foundation took Sam’s scam into account, but not to a full extent. For Vermont, the actual raw number for the ratio of federal expenditures received to federal taxes paid is $4,645 million/$4,085 million, or $1.14 per $1.00. The Tax Foundation revised this downward to $1.08 per $1.00 by making a correction for the cash deficit, which it treated as an extra hidden tax burden. But the feds incur debts not only in cash received vs. cash expended, but also in “internal” transaction, such as misappropriations of funds from the Social Security and Medicare Trusts, which they divert to other purposes. And they incur even larger debts by the accrual of new obligations to pay for future (as yet unfunded) Social Security, Medicare, and drug benefits.
Rethinking the Scam Numbers
Instead of the minimalist deficit correction adopted by the Tax Foundation, it is more equitable to adopt a deficit correction according to the yearly increase of the gross federal debt reported by the US Treasury (see “Historical Debt Outstanding, Annual” www.treasurydirect.gov), which includes debt from internal transactions of the feds but excludes the long-term debt associated with new obligations for payments of future benefits. In 2005, the increase of the gross federal debt was $554 billion.
The Vermont share of this debt was $1,170 million, if shares are allocated per capita. (To put this in perspective, note that this comes to 1,870 for every man, woman and child.) If we regard this deficit as an extra tax burden, the ratio of federal expenditures to total tax burden in Vermont drops to $0.88 per $1.00.
This shows that Vermont is not a beneficiary state. Vermont is paying for its federal benefits through the nose, or, more precisely, Vermont will be paying through the nose once the IOUs that Uncle Sam has signed on our behalf become due, and the Japanese and Chinese who hold these IOUs ask for repayment, plus interest.
But wait, there’s more!
And that is not the whole story. Many of the federal expenditures within Vermont are not made for the benefit of Vermonters, but merely for the benefit of the feds – many of these expenditures are not grants, but financial transactions involving payments for purchases of merchandise or for services rendered.
For instance, a bit more than 4% of the federal expenditures in Vermont are for the operation of the Post Office. Evidently, postal services are a benefit for Vermont. But we pay postage and fees for these services, and the feds’ expenditures are covered by these payments. For a fair accounting, we must either include payments of postage and fees on one side of the balance sheet and the Post Office expenditures of the feds on the other side, or we must remove these items from both sides of the balance sheet. In its analysis, the Tax Foundation did neither. To fix this mistake, let’s subtract all the Post Office expenditures from the Tax Foundation’s balance sheet for Vermont. When these expenditures are subtracted, the benefit of $0.88 per $1.00 is cut to $0.85.
Millions for “Defense”
Similar arguments apply to expenditures for military procurements in Vermont. For example, if the feds pay, say, $100,000 to take possession of a Gatling gun manufactured by General Dynamics in Burlington, then the wealth of Vermont increases by $100,000. But in the balance sheet, we must also include the fair-market value of this gun as a loss to Vermont. If we reckon the fair-market value of the gun as $100,000, then this sale is a wash. Thus, all such procurement payments are not grants, but compensation for merchandise and services rendered, and they should not be counted when comparing what we give to the feds versus what benefits Vermonters get in the “bargain.”
In fact, all defense payments – procurement, military salaries, civilian salaries, and National Guard grants – should be deleted from the balance sheet, because none are actually for the benefit of Vermont. The feds expend defense funds in Vermont not to protect Vermont, but mainly for geopolitical reasons, to protect and expand the commercial and military empire of the United States – and this is of little concern to an independent Vermont Republic. Defense payments (other than pensions and disability payments) are about 11% of federal expenditures in Vermont, and if we delete all this from the balance sheet, we discover that our benefits amount to only $0.75 per $1.00 of taxes raised.
Income tax in a Vermont Republic
For a calculation of the total income tax that Vermonters would have to pay as citizens of an independent Vermont Republic, let’s assume that we retain all programs and grants now being paid for by the feds with the exception of defense and a handful of minor programs of questionable value (e.g. No Child Left Behind grants, Improving Teacher grants, Homeland Security grants.) Let’s also assume that expenditures on all existing Vermont state programs remain the same. The total income tax to be paid in an independent Vermont Republic is then the existing Vermont state income tax, plus a surcharge that pays for the federal programs that we want to retain.
The starting point for the calculation is the total expenditures by the feds in Vermont: $4,645 million. To see how much of this has to be funded by the income tax surcharge, simply subtract the portions that will be deleted in our Vermont Republic, and the portions that are funded by sources other than income taxes. In millions, these subtractions are: $197 (postal service), $496 (defense), $33 (questionable federal programs), $1,894 (Social Security and Medicare, funded by payroll taxes). Besides, the independent Vermont Republic will be collecting the excise taxes, estate taxes, and duties that now accrue to the feds, which effectively subtracts another $280 from the amount that must be raised from income taxes.
Immediate Savings
The residual expenditure to be funded by a Vermont Republic income tax surcharge is then $1,745 million. This is to be compared with the 2005 federal income tax burden of about $2,200 million placed on Vermont. Thus, the citizens and corporations of the Vermont Republic would immediately save about $450 million in income taxes. This amounts to about 16% of the combined 2005 income tax burden (combined federal and state, individual and corporate).
Furthermore, in the long term, we would save the full amount of the deficit burden that the feds, by hook and by crook, place on us. For 2005, the feds’ deficit burden imposed on Vermont amounted to $1,170 million. In contrast, the Vermont Republic would have no deficit; it would cover all expenditures out of the taxes it collects. The combined total savings in tax and deficit burden amount to $1,620 million!
Lessons Learned
Even without independence, this tax analysis teaches a valuable lesson: the feds are giving Vermonters a bad deal. And, with the ballooning deficits proposed for 2009, this deal is getting worse and worse. With the bailouts and economic stimulus packages included, the projected deficit for 2009 is nearly $2 trillion (or more than $6,000 per capita). The feds are taking far more from us than what they give back, and they are drowning us in a tidal wave of red ink and burdensome debt. Besides, they inflict on us a muckload of irksome rules for spending what is, ultimately, our own money.
Borrowing a page from Benjamin Franklin’s playbook, Ethan Allen would have told the feds to go fly a kite and get struck by lightening.
What’s our response?
This article was authored by Hans Ohanian and published in Vermont Commons: Mudseason 2009. Dr. Ohanian is an adjunct Physics Professor at the University of Vermont and supporter of an independent Vermont Republic.
July 5, 2009
We’re Number Seven!!
With a projected deficit of $238 million in 2010, which is 21.5% of our General Fund, we rank 7th out of 50 states for the honor of Worst Expected 2010 Budget Gaps!
For a state that prides itself so much on independence and sustainability, this seems contradictory.
July 3, 2009
Tea Parties for the Rich?
I wrote this as a response on another blog to all those who are accusing Tea Party folks of getting suckered into working for Corporate America:
This is something that has come up a few times, that Corporate America is cheering the Tea Parties because they want folks fighting for lower taxes on Big Business and less regulation. As a legitimate card-carrying TeaBagger, meaning I was involved in the Ron Paul campaign during the 2008 Primary elections and helped organize this year’s April 15 event and was pissed off to see Take Back Vermont signs there, I can tell you that I do not work for the benefit of Corporate America and in fact the original intention behind the Tea Parties is the opposite of what big business would want.
Let’s consider for a moment something simple, the fact that lobbyists don’t even bother talking to Ron Paul any more because he is unbribeable. While all your precious Democratic congressmen and women (and of course the other Republicans too) take bribes left and right to pass legislation to favor one business over another, Dr. Paul works to maintain a ‘free market,’ something we have not had in this country for a long long time.
Let’s go further now… Monetary Policy. All us original VT Teabagging Teabaggers are the ones who hounded Peter Welch to sign HR1207 entitled ‘The Federal Reserve Transparancy Act.’ Ron Paul introduced this a couple months ago and it now has 245 co-sponsors while it waits to be reviewed in the House Finance Committee. Peter Welch co-sponsored a bill introduced by a Republican because it seems to make sense that the Federal Reserve, which currently is immune from a real audit, should be audited, that congress should be able to see how much money they’re printing behind closed doors, which foreign countries and banks they’re doing favors for, how much of our debt they are liquidating by simply inflating/destroying our currency. In fact, our own Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders wrote and introduced the sister bill in the Senate entitled the Federal Reserve Sunshine Act of 2009, which has 3 co-sponsors, all of whom are Republican! OMG!!!
As long as GM, Phizer, Monsanto, Goldman Sachs, etc. have congress in their back pockets and a nontransparent Fed then tax brackets are inconsequential, because they can get easy credit during the booms and bailouts during the busts. HR1207 will severly impair that because it goes to the heart of the matter.
Those of you who ask why no one Teabagged during the Bush years pose a reasonable question, my answer is twofold: that there was not the catalyst of an enormous financial collapse to wake people up to monetary issues, and that Ron Paul had not made his Presidential Bid. I waited for three hours in the rain in Ohio in 2004 to vote for Kerry because of a concern for the middle and lower classes, but that was before I understood anything about Free Market Austrian Economics. A big government can create more social programs and give out more money everyday, but it won’t come close to supporting the little guy as much as Sound Money does, when a private bank (the Fed) doesn’t have exclusive access to the printing press and congress oversees the money supply (or gold can too). Foreign wars without a declaration from congress target the little guys too, as they tend to enlist before wealthy kids do. Luckily we have people like Dr. Paul who have always voted against all these undeclared wars, can’t say the same about our current President.
July 1, 2009
Vermont Secession: Beyond the Straw Men
Probably the biggest blow to the Vermont independence movement came in 2007 with the League of the South controversy. Sparked by a Southern Poverty Law Center report on Second Vermont Republic’s ties to the League of the South, and fanned by an anonymous blog and an assortment of Vermont bloggers, the controversy focused most of the Vermont political blogosphere discourse around whether or not SVR founder Thomas Naylor is a closet racist and whether SVR is a front for the a modern white supremacist/neo-confederate agenda.
This controversy has had the unfortunate (or intended?) effect of closing off discussion of the many important issues that Naylor and others in the independence camp have brought up. The accusation of racism is one of the most effective ways to delegitimize an individual or idea in modern American society, and in this case it has been utilized to effectively narrow the range of acceptable discourse around sustainability and decentralism among Vermont’s intellectuals. It’s okay to discuss buying local, and maybe even peak-oil; but heaven forfend one brings up the unsustainability of the Federal Government (both in terms of its scale and its fiscal policies). Only racists like Thomas Naylor talk about that stuff.
The thing that strikes me as most disappointing about this whole state of affairs is that it seems that some those most eagerly attacking SVR are actually folks who value decentralism. Therefore, I’d be curious to know what people (particularly the GMD crew) think of the independence question divorced from personality-based attacks on Naylor. For anti-Naylor folks who support it in principle, it seems to me that the intellectually honest thing to do is to start a rival organization that takes the critiques of the last few years into account; for those who oppose secession in principle, I urge you to argue the real meat of the issues at hand rather than fixating on a thoroughly beaten straw-man.
What I personally understand SVR and the Middlebury institute to be doing is working to build a sort of meta-secessionist movement with the purpose of legitimizing the idea of secession in America, divorced from any particular set of political values. Because of the Civil War, we have the knee-jerk reaction of associating secession with slavery, but anyone with more than a cursory knowledge of world history know that there have been countless example of justifiable and progressive political dissolution (the breakup of the Soviet Union being but one instance). This total association of the Civil War with secession in the American political consciousness has become a source of Federal Legitimacy which reifies the narrative of American History as a story of continuous centralization. As a result, Americans seem to have forgotten that, in our own case as in the case of other countries, governments and nations are merely structures created by human beings. The knowledge of this means that, when they become abusive or decadent, we have the responsibility to deal with those issues head on rather than retreating into the comfortable myths of nationhood. It’s really easy to play the guilt by association and character assassination games; it’s much harder to take on the immense problems we now face and attempt to determine through discourse what needs to be done.
June 29, 2009
MJ and the Recent Salience of Celebrity Deaths
It seems that for the past week, much of our collective American consciousness has been absorbed in the death of Michael Jackson. Personally, I’m too young to have memories of him as anything other than a weirdo has-been, but, judging from many older folks’ reactions, he seems to have had a profound impact upon a great number of Americans’ lives. So, indeed, it was a sad event for many people.
What I’ve found particularly interesting about this situation, however, is how his death has brought into greater salience the deaths of minor celebrities whose passing would normally have been marked only by subcultures. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have heard of the passing of Farrah Fawcett and Billy Mays had their deaths not been clustered near MJ’s. The sociological question this raises is: how long will the MJ Grim Reaper Effect last? Will it begin fading in the next few days, or will we be hearing about celebrity deaths as front page news for weeks (distracting us from, say, an unemployment rate about to break into the double digits and the introduction of “Build America Bonds” which will suck huge amounts of domestic capital out of private markets). Also, I wonder if this effect can be spotted in the cases of other notable deaths. If it can, then perhaps a quantifiable metric of star power can be developed. The length of time it takes for celebrity death salience to return to its baseline level in this case could be deemed “1 MJ”, and the cultural influence of other notable folks can be thus compared with a fixed point. If I actually cared about the bullsh*t culture of celebrity worship, I’d probably take the time to do some number crunching.
Since I don’t, however, I wonder if a similar “MJ Effect” can be found in various other mass media phenomena. For instance, a well publicized plane crash increases the exposure of minor plane crashes that would otherwise have never made it past the local news cycle. Since it is a similar event in type, there is a window of time when people don’t put as much weight upon that particular event’s magnitude in their information discrimination. It seems like mastering this dynamic would be a powerful tool for influencing public opinion, as one could use the salience caused by a particular kind of event to raise the salience of a completely different topic by tying it to the a minor event of the initially salient type. I shall have to cast about and see if this process has already been systematized by any thinkers. If so, it might provide a systematic explanation for the types of events that emerge from day to day on the front page of Google News, as well as clarifying the orgins and spread of a host of memes.
June 29, 2009
Education in Sudan
All the way from Uganda, Diane joins us during her first visit to the United States. Since 2008 she has worked with the New Sudan Education Initiative (NESEI), which was founded here in Burlington in 2006 by Sudanese men who sought refuge in Vermont from their war-torn homes. Diane serves as NESEI’s Program Director and during the interview tells us in detail about her work in Sudan, in addition to explaining the political climate of Uganda and Sudan.
June 25, 2009
Welch’s first opponent in the Primary
Concerned about the economic policies of the Obama administration, which Peter Welch has obediently supported, Dan Weintraub will be challenging him in the 2010 VT Congressional Democratic Primary. In the interview he explains his socially liberal perspectives, in addition to his support for non-Keynesian monetary reform.
June 22, 2009
Vermont Secession discussed on Glenn Beck
Leader of the Second Vermont Republic, Thomas Naylor spoke with Glenn Beck tonight about murmurs of secession becoming louder over the past few weeks.
July 5, 2009
Gangster Government
It’s one thing to theorize what could happen behind closed doors between politicians and nationalized businesses, it’s another to hear it brought up on the House floor. Michelle Bachman (R) Rep from Minnesota calls out Senators and Congressmen who have already been using political clout to pick and choose which Government Motors (formally General Motors) dealerships get to stay open.
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