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Third North American Secession Convention

Started by Friday, October 07, 2008, 07:51 PM NHFT

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Friday

Quote from: joeyforpresident on November 30, 2008, 08:36 PM NHFT
Excuse me for inquiring, but was the conference in Manchester due to underlying attempts (organized or not) to have FSP folks try to get NH to secede? Or was it just a random place?


I seriously doubt it was due to any efforts by FSP folks to get NH to secede.  Actually, there were no NH secessionist organizations presenting (see my blog for a lengthy write-up on the convention).  I think the Middlebury Institute is going back and forth between holding it in the North and in the South, and this was the North's turn.  Frankly, I was surprised that there weren't more FSP folks in attendance.

Friday

Quote from: BillKauffman on November 30, 2008, 09:28 PM NHFT
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Kauffman

Political beliefs

Although he is known as a paleoconservative, his politics remain difficult to categorize, as he holds strong libertarian leanings with culturally conservative and isolationist inclinations. He is a critic of development, frequently writes approvingly of distributism and agrarianism, and is strongly anti-corporate. Kauffman has described his politics as "a blend of Catholic Worker, Old Right libertarian, Yorker transcendentalist, and delirious localist." He has also described himself as a "Jeffersonian," an "anarchist," a "cheerful enemy of the state," a "reactionary Friend of the Library," and a "peace-loving football fan." Although he remains a registered Democrat, he rarely supports their candidates or their platform and has frequently voted Green since the collapse of the Reform Party in 2000.

Other positions adopted by Kauffman that are considered controversial to both the Left and the Right include his support for the Second Vermont Republic secessionist movement, his admiration for 1972 Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern, his argument that Catholic Worker activist Dorothy Day had much in common with elements of the Right, and his contention that Philip Roth's book The Plot Against America is "the novel that a neoconservative would write, if a neoconservative could write a novel." In 2004, he endorsed Ralph Nader for President of the United States. On September 2, 2008, he addressed the Rally for the Republic in Saint Paul, Minnesota put on by Ron Paul (R-TX).


You have your own Wikipedia page?  Color me impressed.

BillKauffman

http://novacadia.org/Inserts/New%20England%20Group%20Looks%20to%20Secede.htm

New England Groups Look to Secede

by Jim Kozubek, New Hampshire Union Leader

NEW CASTLE For the time political campaigns have been moving to centrism, integrating voter blocs and appealing to unity, scattered groups across New England have been moving to fractionalize, to break their states from the union.

Burt Cohen, 57, a former state senator, is leading a front in New Hampshire to secede from the U.S., and join with Maine, Vermont, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Gaspé Peninsula to create a new authority called New Acadia or Novacadia based on maps of a 1702 maritime union.

"This is a continuation of my politics," Cohen said. "I am interested in people taking part in decisions, and right now, it seems to me that fewer and fewer people have more concentrated wealth and power."

Secessionists draw the soul of their ideas from the 1957 Leopold Kohr book The Breakdown of Nations in which Kohr argued social and economic failures are due to a deplorable condition of "bigness," he said.

The logic is based on the idea that individuals, cities and regions have diverse economic and political interests; once a population becomes too large, resources and taxes are not fairly dispensed and a government fails to provide adequate representation, he said.

"The founding fathers could not have imagined 300 million people," he said.

"This country includes a lot of people with disparate points of view, and to have them represented in a single government, you have to ask, how realistic is that?"

Cohen said that instead of political moves to centrism and unity, New Englanders could find greater economic and social advantages in a move to decentralization.

He bases this idea, of economic regionalism, on a 1981 Joel Garreau book, "The Nine Nations of North America," that insists the U.S. is made up of nine bioregions, each with unique interests.

"People in bio-regions have much more in common, shared values and can find what works best for economic development that might not work in another region," he said.

Cohen, a self-described "progressive," is looking for a mix of support from libertarians, paleo-conservatives suspect of higher-spending subsidies and defense budgets, and those willing to ask "a lot of very serious, legitimate questions."

For one, he said, New Hampshire has for years paid more to the federal government than it gets in spending.

"I have spoken lightly with some individuals who filed and there is interest," said Howard Wilson of Andover, a libertarian and state Senate candidate. "The federal government is part of the problem, and we are going to put them on notice."

Secessionists in their writings oppose high defense spending and intervention, corporate subsidies, bailouts of financial institutions and central banking.

Caleb Johnson of Keene, for instance, set up republicofnh.org for secession, with papers citing federal borrowing and printing of "fiat currency" as causes of a weakening dollar, predicting dismal outcomes.

But the forms of capitalism, free-trade and protectionism, have remained sources of division in secessionist movements.

Nova Scotia's Atlantica Party made electoral reform a priority to secession with Atlantic Institute for Market Studies began a bid in 2006 to create a free-trade zone in New England and Nova Scotia called Atlantica.

Atlantic Institute seeks to capitalize on the region's maritime position in the era of globalization, but the move drew a small-scale riot at its 2006 convention from the Black Bloc, a group who thinks the free-trade zone will harm worker and environmental rights.

Sebastian Ronin, a strident localist, broke with Atlantic Party in 2007 and created the Novacadia party to secede (citing the 2000 Clarity Act created relative to Quebec's mid-1990s separatist movement that gives provinces the legal right to secede).

Thomas Naylor, 72, economics professor emeritus from Duke University, and founder of the Second Vermont Republic for secession in 2003, connected Ronin with New England movements.

The first secessionist convention in Vermont in 2006 drew 300 people (11 to 13 percent of the state supports secession, said University of Vermont polls) and last year representatives from 25 states signed a document called the Chattanooga Declaration.

It said "the old right-left split is meaningless and dead" and due to the "privileges, monopolies, and powers that private corporations have won from governments without secession, liberty and self-government can never be sustained."

The third convention is at the Radisson Hotel in Manchester from Nov. 14 to 16, drawing Cohen, Naylor, Ronin, Carolyn Chute, 61, author and founder of 2nd Maine Militia, Kirkpatrick Sale, 71, of Middlebury Institute in New York, Clyde Wilson of University of South Carolina and Donald Livingston of Emory University, each of League of the South.

Russell Kanning

Quote from: Friday on November 30, 2008, 09:31 PM NHFT
You have your own Wikipedia page?  Color me impressed.
you should have been looking for Bill Grennon

KBCraig


Friday


KBCraig

#36
Quote from: Friday on December 01, 2008, 10:44 AM NHFT
Quote from: KBCraig on December 01, 2008, 10:17 AM NHFT
Quote from: Friday on November 30, 2008, 09:31 PM NHFT
You have your own Wikipedia page?  Color me impressed.
Save the admiration for a Wiki page in his own name.
I don't understand what you mean?

I mean the same thing Russell said:
Quote from: Russell Kanning on December 01, 2008, 06:27 AM NHFT
Quote from: Friday on November 30, 2008, 09:31 PM NHFT
You have your own Wikipedia page?  Color me impressed.
you should have been looking for Bill Grennon

Friday

KBCraig, what's your source of information that user BillKauffman is Bill Grennon?

Kat Kanning

Common sense says so.  Bill Grennon was there.  BillKauffman is reporting on it.

Friday

Quote from: Kat Kanning on December 02, 2008, 01:08 PM NHFT
Common sense says so.  Bill Grennon was there.  BillKauffman is reporting on it.
How would KBCraig know that Bill Grennon was there? 

BillKauffman

Both Bills where there. We talked a number of times together. He even bought me a beer in the bar.

One of us is a slacker while the other is writing a book on secession and wrote an article on the first SVR secession meeting in VT for Pat Buchanan's magazine.

http://www.amconmag.com/article/2005/dec/19/00016/

Although SVR members range from hippie greens to gun owners—and among the virtues of Vermont is that the twain do sometimes meet—Naylor describes his group's ideological coloration as "leftish libertarian with an anarchist streak."

The SVR lauds the principles and practices of direct democracy, local control of education and health care, small-scale farming, neighborhood enterprise, and the devolution of political power. The movement is anti-globalist and sees beauty in the small. It detests Wal-Mart, the Interstate Highway System, and a foreign policy that is "immoral, illegal, and unconstitutional." It draws inspiration from, among others, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who in bidding farewell to his neighbors in Cavendish, Vermont, where he had lived in exile for 17 years, praised "the sensible and sure process of grassroots democracy, in which the local population solves most of its problems on its own, not waiting for the decisions of higher authorities."

Naylor likes to say that Wal-Mart, which is "too big, too powerful, too intrusive, too mean-spirited, too materialistic, too dehumanizing, too undemocratic, too environmentally insensitive, and too unresponsive to the social, cultural, and economic needs of individual citizens and small communities," is the American metaphor in these post-republic days. Perhaps it is. So why not a new metaphor, suggests Naylor: that of Vermont, which is "smaller, more rural, more democratic, less violent, less commercial, more egalitarian, and more independent" than its sister states?

When Naylor laid out the case for independence in The Vermont Manifesto (2003), the political air was heavy, sodden, statist. "Even in the best of times secession is a very tough sell in the USA," lamented Naylor in 2002. "Since Sept. 11, it has proven to be an impossible sell." But George, Scooter, and Wolfie, for whom Vermont is just another inconsequential state full of potential bodybag fillers, came to the rescue, putting a rebarbative face on the Empire and opening the door to radical possibilities.

In stepped the Second Vermont Republic, with a blend of whimsicality and seriousness, and its "eye-catching street theater has proven irresistible to the media, as has its exponential growth in the aftermath of the 2004 elections," according to Cathy Resmer of the Burlington weekly Seven Days.

With polemical wit provided by Vermont's Bread and Puppet Theater, the SVR has staged mock funeral processions, parades, and Fourth of July floats in which children declared their independence from bedtime, "annoying siblings," and "my floaties." The SVR has even achieved a symbolic political success, persuading the legislature to declare Jan. 16 as Vermont Independence Day in commemoration of the establishment of the First Vermont Republic in 1777.

The group's seriousness of purpose is evident in its literate monthly, Vermont Commons, which includes contributions from the likes of Wendell Berry, Bill McKibben, and Kirkpatrick Sale on such topics as family and organic farming, community-supported agriculture, land trusts, and local currencies—constituting in sum, a humane and practicable alternative to the Empire of Wal-Mart and Warfare. The tincture is green, but conservative, too, and although Naylor refuses to kiss up to his state's hack politicians—he calls Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy "a world-class prostitute"—the Republican lieutenant governor has praised the SVR for "their energy and their passion."


KBCraig

Quote from: Friday on December 02, 2008, 12:39 PM NHFT
KBCraig, what's your source of information that user BillKauffman is Bill Grennon?

How many Georgists with the same writing style can there be?

Russell Kanning

#42
if it posts like bill grennon than then it may be bill grennon ;)

I think the real bill grennon has an account here and is really funny.

Kat Kanning


Kevin Bean

Be sure to send me your Virtual Economic Rent.
Might seem like infinite space here in the intertubes, but it is indeed finite.

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Wouldn't want to be seen as using up this limited resource to the exclusion of others, now would you.

;D

Thank you, I'll be here all week!
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