by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts

As published in Trend Alert,
KINGSTON, NY, 08 MAY 2012 — An emerging foreign policy trend is Cold War II.  The US military/security complex, with help from Obama and Hillary Clinton, is working overtime to revive the profitable long-term stalemate of the Cold War that lasted four decades from the Berlin airlift to the Reagan-Gorbachev accord. During this long period Congress and the public supported an endless array of weapons systems to deter the “Soviet threat,” which, until President Richard Nixon’s opening to China in the early 1970s, comprised together with China the “Communist threat.”

This threat was not all spin.  It had an element of real potential, but the threat was hyped to the limit. In the 1950s in Atlanta, Georgia, and elsewhere school children were issued military dog tags, just like the ones GIs would yank off the necks of their dead colleagues in the war movies, with their blood type in event of a nuclear attack. Some Americans built bomb shelters on their home properties. Senator Joseph McCarthy led a witch hunt for communists, and although there were some communists and communist sympathizers in sensitive positions, McCarthyism had many innocent victims, just like “the war on terror.”

Anyone with a social conscience was suspect.  The Hollywood blacklist or equivalent suspicion fell upon the likes of Bertolt Brecht, Charlie Chaplin, Aaron Copland, and Lena Horne. Even Carl Foreman, who wrote the screenplay for High Noon, the Gary Cooper Western, was blacklisted, and the stripper, Gypsy Rose Lee, was investigated by the House Committee on un-American Activities.  Even Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Manhattan Project and the “father of the atomic bomb” was under investigation for “left-wing associations” while he developed the first nuclear weapon for the US government. Oppenheimer was on the FBI’s Custodial Detention Index for arrest in case of national emergency.

Whether serious or not, the “Soviet threat” was more real than the “Muslim threat.” The Red Army had defeated Hitler’s previously undefeated armies. In the aftermath of World War II many believed that only nuclear weapons could stop the Red Army from overrunning Western Europe. When the Soviet Union acquired the hydrogen bomb, the public was willing to support the amounts of military spending and security measures necessary to protect the West from the Soviet threat.

New Threat Needed

When the Soviet threat disappeared 20 years ago, the military-security complex was at a loss. A new threat was needed to keep the money and power flowing into the military-security complex.  China wasn’t an option. Its new leaders were embracing capitalism, and China was on its way to becoming Washington’s largest foreign creditor. How do you bash your banker?  Moreover, China was welcoming American corporations that had discovered that it was profitable to produce in China the goods and services that they sold in US markets.  The influential American interests that were becoming allies with China caused the military-security complex to look elsewhere for an enemy.

With the help of the neoconservatives, the military-security complex found the enemy in the Muslim Middle East among the independent states that were not US puppets.

The Muslim wars of the first and into the second decade of the 21st century have not been satisfactory replacements for the “Soviet threat.”  There is nothing powerful about Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and Iran comparable to the Soviet Union or even to 1950s Red China, which fought the US superpower to a standstill in Korea.

The problem with the “war on terror” is that it is a hot war, not a cold one, that goes on forever. Although expensive and, thereby, rewarding to the profits and power of the military-security complex, the problem with hot wars is that when they do go on forever, no one believes you are a superpower.

Why is it that Superpower America was in Iraq for eight years and only “won” after putting the insurgents on the US military payroll and paying them to stop killing American troops?  How come after 11 years in Afghanistan the US Superpower and its NATO mercenaries have failed to subdue the Taliban, a few thousand guys armed with AK-47s?  Recently, the Taliban took over Kabul, the American occupied capital of Afghanistan, and attacked the Western embassies for several hours. Last week the Taliban confidently announced its spring offensive against “the invaders.”

Eight- and eleven-year hot wars are definitely profitable, but when they cannot be won, what happens to the Superpower’s reputation?  What happens to the morale of its armed forces? The evidence is in: military suicides exceed combat deaths.

To protect its superpower status and morale of the military, Washington needs a new enemy, an enemy it can hype without coming to blows.  Washington’s first choice was Russia. Washington did everything possible to provoke Russia. Washington took NATO into Eastern Europe. Washington unilaterally withdrew from the anti-ballistic missile treaty in June 2002. Since this time, Washington has surrounded Russia with anti-ballistic missile bases designed to negate Russia’s nuclear deterrent and to make Russia impotent in the event of US aggression against Russian interests. Washington sponsored “color revolutions” in former Soviet republics and has attempted to make Georgia and even Ukraine members of NATO.

It has taken the Russians a long time to understand that Washington is not a trustworthy ally for peace. Finally, the Russian Chief of General Staff, Nikolai Makarov said at an international conference on May 3 attended by Washington’s operatives and its NATO puppets that Russia will preemptively strike the anti-ballistic missile sites “if the situation worsens.”

Washington has told the Russians the transparent lie that the anti-missile shield is directed at Iranian nuclear missiles. However, the Russians understand full well that Iran has no such missiles.  In other words, Washington is doubly provoking Russia by providing an obvious false reason for its naked aggression against Russia.

It took the Russian government a decade to understand the American threat.  In the meantime, Washington gave up on drawing Russia into a new cold war and turned to China.

This turn was not completely easy. China had become Washington’s largest foreign creditor, purchasing with its export earnings the US Treasury bonds that finance the military-security complex’s profitable wars. Moreover, China is the site of a number of major US corporations that produce in China for their US markets.

Starting trouble with China is not without costs.

But costs mean little to the profits of the military security complex, because the costs are almost entirely external to their own profits.  The costs fall on the population and the world as a whole, not on the military-security complex.

It is difficult to demonize Russia, as Russia does not own massive amounts of US debt and does not have large trade surpluses with the US that can be attributed to “currency manipulation.”  The fact that China pegged its currency to the dollar in order to solidify its value as China entered world trade allows Washington to claim that China is “manipulating its currency to America’s disadvantage.”

Cold Warriors Turn To China

China is being constructed into America’s new bogyman, with Putin in reserve. Once the military-security complex discovered that China was no longer needed as a creditor, because the Federal Reserve was willing to assume the role of all creditors and purchase the entirety of the debt issued to cover Washington’s huge annual operating deficit, every provocation possible has been thrown at China.

The insults heaved at China go beyond hypocritical human rights accusations or asylum for Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng. A year ago Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared that Washington has a “national interest” in the South China Sea. This interest showed itself last month in joint US-Philippines military exercises. China’s response was  a warning that the joint military exercises raise the risks of armed confrontation over the disputed South China Sea. The Liberation Army Daily put the warning bluntly: “Anyone with clear eyes saw long ago that behind these drills is reflected a mentality that will lead the South China Sea issue down a fork in the road to military confrontation and resolution through armed force.”

Despite such warnings, Washington continues to stick its nose into China’s disputes with Philippines, Vietnam, and Malaysia, revealing, in the words of the Liberation Army Daily “the United States’ intention of trying to draw more countries into stirring up the situation in the South China Sea.”

To increase its military presence in the Asia-Pacific, Washington intends to construct a naval base on South Korea’s Jeju Island. Washington has sent US Marines to Australia and is reassigning US Marines from Japan to other Asia-Pacific locations. Pentagon spokesman George Little said the reassignment “signals our commitment to Asia Pacific and it is a reflection of our emphasis on Asia Pacific.”  A deal is being cut for the US Navy to return to Subic Bay, and according to some reports Washington is working to get the Philippine government’s agreement for Japanese Self-Defense Forces to be stationed alongside US troops on Philippine bases.

Thus has Washington positioned itself on the side of the Philippines in the dispute with China over the Spratly Islands and Scarborough Shoal, and on the side of Japan in the dispute with China over the Diaoyu Islands. Washington has intentionally militarized the area as its means of instigating a profitable long-term cold war with China.

Unlike Cold War I when the US economy was growing and the incomes of Americans were rising, today the US economy remains mired in years of recession. Much of the US industrial and manufacturing base has been lost. For a decade or longer the economy has been unable to create high-productivity, high-wage jobs.  Both citizens and government are deeply in debt. The unemployment rate declines because discouraged Americans unable to find jobs drop out of the work force and cease to be counted as unemployed.

Washington might imagine that the Federal Reserve can continue to finance $1 trillion annual military/security budgets by monetizing the government’s debt. However, printing money with which to buy things eventually means high inflation.

There are only two ways to finance Cold War II.  One is to continue to collect the payroll tax but cease to pay Social Security and Medicare benefits. The other is to seize the remaining wealth in private pensions and IRAs.

Cold War II is going to be a bad experience for Americans.

The Chinese economy is dynamic and vibrant. It has been growing at unprecedented rates for 30 years. China has trade surpluses, large reserves of foreign exchange, and has raised 600 million people out of poverty. The US is broke, and its citizens are sinking into poverty.

In other words, the US has lost Cold War II before it begins.

Publisher’s Note:  Dr. Paul Craig Roberts is a former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, columnist for Business Week, and professor of economics, Dr. Roberts served on personal and committee staffs in the House and Senate and as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy during the Reagan Administration.

©MMXII The Trends Research Institute®

Little did I know that when I began teaching at Tulane University in 1961 and three years later at Duke, where I taught for thirty years, that I was participating in a defacto coup d’état in American business education which would give rise to a period of unprecedented economic prosperity followed by the economic meltdown of 2007-2008.

Although what I had been hired to do at Tulane, namely, introduce courses in quantitative business analysis and management science in the undergraduate business curriculum, appeared on the surface to be quite innocuous, it turned out not to be so innocent at all.

Even though the seeds of American imperialism were sewn in the Mexican War (1846-1848), the Civil War (1861-1865), the Spanish-American War (1898), World War I (1914-1918), and World War II (1939-1945), the United States did not truly become an empire until after World War II.  Unbeknownst to me the United States was about to become an empire due in no small part to the revolution getting underway in business education.

Following on the heels of a 1959 Ford Foundation report calling for radical changes in business education in the United States, Tulane had obtained funding from Ford to beef up business research; strengthen the Business School’s grounding in economics, behavioral science, and quantitative analysis; and improve the professionalism of the school’s undergraduate business and MBA programs.  To help lead the revolution at Tulane I was paid a whopping $5,600 per year.  These were heady times!

Prior to the onset of the revolution business schools were viewed as comatose like institutions whose students took too many vocational business courses, too few liberal arts courses including math and science, and played too much because they had so few academic demands on their time.  Research in business schools tended to be unscientific, mundane, or nonexistent.  Business school faculty and students were treated as anti-intellectual, unprofessional, second class citizens.

Against this moribund backdrop the confluence of four forces precipitated the Business School Revolution in the 1950s.  These forces are spelled out in the recent book by Mie Augier and James G. March entitled The Roots, Rituals, and Rhetorics of Change (Stanford University Press, 2011).

First, the lasting positive impact on medical education in the United States of a 1910 report by Abraham Flexner provided an important role model for those interested in business education reform.  Based on evaluations of 155 medical schools in the United States, the Flexner Report called for tougher entry requirements, fewer medical schools, more scientific research, increased professionalism, and improved funding.  There was a widespread view that the Flexner Report had resulted in increased rigor and more involvement in basic research throughout academic medicine in America. It appeared to offer a model which might be emulated by business schools.

Second, an important byproduct of World War II was a new discipline known as operations research which was characterized by the use of sophisticated mathematical models and statistical techniques to solve managerial decision problems.  Operations research provided the intellectual foundation underlying an Air Force think tank known as the RAND Corporation launched in 1948 in Santa Monica, California.

According to Augier and March:

RAND championed a creed that celebrated multidisciplinary work, problem framing, mathematical social science and operations analysis, and the application of refined intelligence and educated technique to imagining new ways of resolving old social problems, beginning with problems of national security and extending ultimately to a wide range of public concerns.  In particular, the focus was on the use of decision theory, mathematics, statistics, and microeconomic analysis to improve the choices made by leaders of social collectivities (such as armies, firms, nations).

RAND soon became an incubator, laboratory testing ground, and promoter of creative new ideas in the decision sciences.  It attracted the crème de la crème of those working in the fields of economics, operations research, and organization theory including such luminaries as Kenneth Arrow, Tjalling Koopmans, Jacob Marschak, Roy Radner, Howard Raiffa, Martin Shubik, Herbert Simon, and Oliver Williamson to mention only a few.  By the 1960s RAND had become the place to be and the place to be seen, if you were an aspiring young business school professor.  RAND along with other Defense Department related think tanks such as the Office of Naval Research (ONR) and the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) soon began to have considerable influence over the kind of research conducted in American business schools.  But this was just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the influence the Pentagon would soon wield over higher education in America.  There was no turning back.

Third, the influence on the business education revolt of University of Chicago President Robert Maynard Hutchins and Economist Milton Friedman cannot possibly be overestimated.  Throughout his tenure as President Hutchins vigorously promoted “vicious intellectualism” and research based interdisciplinary scholarship, which resonated with those in search of a new mission for business education.  On the other hand, Professor Milton Friedman and his colleague George Stigler brought an almost religious-like commitment to radical free-market economics to the table.  This was an ideology which fiercely opposed labor unions and any form of government regulation, ownership, or control.  The name of the game was deregulation, privatization, and globalization.  The full impact of the Chicago School of Economics on business education did not kick in until the 1980s when President Ronald Reagan zealously promoted its use to the exclusion of any other form of economics.

Fourth, perhaps the most important force influencing the radical transformation of business education was the 1959 Ford Foundation commissioned report by two University of California, Berkeley, economists, Aaron Gordon and James Howell, calling for a virtual revolution in business education.  Gordon and Howell recommended that business education become more professional, less vocationally oriented, more scientific, and more research based.  In addition, they recommended that business school curricula increase their course offerings in economics, quantitative analysis, and behavioral science.

Between 1954 and 1964 the Ford Foundation spent over $35 million on programs to improve business schools and management education according to Augier and March:

It commissioned a major report, provided grants to business schools, supported graduate fellowships, established prizes for business school dissertation research, and supported conferences and training sessions in new methods for old faculty.

Over two-thirds of the money spent by Ford went to eight business schools:  Carnegie Tech, Chicago, Columbia, Harvard, MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley, and UCLA.  But the crown jewel in Ford’s portfolio of grant recipients was the Graduate School of Industrial Administration at Carnegie Institute of Technology.  GSIA became the poster child of the business school coup d’état.  It was considered by most to be the place where the most innovative and most radical changes were taking place.

By the late 1970s all of the major business schools in the United States and many of the less important ones were in compliance with all of the recommendations of the 1959 Ford Foundation report.  They were also all marching to the ideological beat of the Chicago School of Economics drum.  Milton Friedman was their God.

Courses in management science, operations research, information systems, quantitative analysis, linear programming, computer simulation, and inventory control replaced descriptive courses in marketing, production, and personnel management.  Business schools became more research oriented and more professional as well.  Their status within colleges and universities began to rise accordingly.  To have an MBA meant that you were highly marketable and that you would be sought out by Wall Street and Corporate America who would offer premium wages for your services.  Indeed, that’s what it was all about.

But there was much more.  The groundwork had been laid for business schools to assume a much more influential role with Corporate America, Wall Street, the U.S. Government, and the Pentagon.

As the house of cards came crashing down on Wall Street and the global economy continued to melt down in 2008, the premier graduate schools of business who trained most of the architects and promoters of the financial debacle remained eerily silent on the sidelines.  Yet is was from MBA programs at places like Harvard, Wharton, Yale, Chicago, Columbia, and Stanford that Wall Street’s movers and shakers learned most of their dirty tricks such as creative accounting, insider trading, bribery, hostile takeovers, stock price manipulation, anti-labor tactics, lying, cheating, and fraud to mention only a few.  There they acquired the necessary skills to transform Wall Street into a global Ponzi scheme.  Hedge funds, derivative contracts, credit default swaps, exchange-traded funds, and sophisticated mathematical models were all part of the greed driven drill.  It was at business schools where Corporate America’s future leaders learned how to use behavioral science to manipulate consumers and employees alike so that their ever increasing salaries would go unnoticed below the radar screen.  It was all about the political economy of greed.

As I watched the financial meltdown unfold, I experienced feelings of déjà vu.  Back in the 1980s for a period of six years, I taught all of the courses on business strategy at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business.  Each semester I would ask my students to write a personal strategic plan for the ten-year period after their graduation from Duke’s MBA program.  The question I posed was “What do you want to be when you grow up?”  With few exceptions, they wanted money, power, and things – very big things including vacation homes, expensive automobiles, yachts, and even airplanes.  They were primarily concerned with their careers and the growth of their financial portfolios.  It was all about greed and personal pleasure.  Their personal plans contained little room for family, intellectual development, spiritual growth, or social responsibility.

Their mandate to the faculty was “Teach me how to be a moneymaking, money spending machine.  Give me only the facts, tools, and computer techniques required to ensure my instantaneous financial success.”  Everything else was fundamentally irrelevant.

Their God was technology – particularly the computer.  Technology represented the ultimate solution to all of their problems – professional, financial, social, personal, political, and even geopolitical.  Only through technology could they deny their finiteness and guarantee their own immortality.  They had much rather automate a factory than negotiate with a difficult labor union.  Missile defense systems were preferable to negotiating with the Soviet Union, which was perceived to  be our enemy then.  Courses on business ethics and corporate responsibility were used by manipulative MBA students to come up with pseudomoral justifications for their narcissistic, materialistic, sociopathic behavior.

My Duke students exemplified cultural historian Morris Berman’s thesis in Why America Failed that what America has always been about is “hustling, materialism, and the pursuit of personal gain without regard for its effects on others.”

President Ronald Reagan and University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman were the heroes of my MBA students.  Reagan had assured Americans that what life was really all about was “looking out for number one.”  He once said, much to their delight, that “what I want to see above all is that this country remains a country where someone can always get rich.”  And he did just that.  As for Friedman, his irresponsible aphorism that “the only social responsibility of business is to make as much money as possible for the stockholders” was viewed with religious fervor.  Anything goes so long as the company is making as much money as possible for the shareholders.  This was an ideology to beat all ideologies – an ideology embraced by Wall Street and Corporate America for the next two decades and an ideology which resulted in the greatest recession since the 1930s.

But the chickens have finally come home to roost, and the cataclysmic failure of graduate schools of business is now painfully obvious to all.  Business school deans and professors are nowhere to be found on either the evening news or on television talk shows.  At a time when business schools should be engaged in serious introspective discussions about what went wrong, it’s business as usual at the academy.

The collapse of the American financial system raised serious doubts about the legitimacy of business education in a university curriculum.  Business schools are a national disgrace.  George W. Bush and Mitt Romney both received their MBAs from the Harvard Business School.  Need we say more?

On September 17, 2011, in tiny Zucotti Park in lower Manhattan, the so-called 99 percent fired the first shot across the bow aimed squarely at the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans, officially launching the Occupy Wall Street movement.

OWS is nothing less than a frontal assault on the materialism, the greed, the inequality, the unemployment, the poverty, the environmental degradation, the racism, the cronyism, and the militarism associated with American capitalism.  The American Empire is too big, too centralized, too powerful, too undemocratic, too intrusive, too violent, and too unresponsive to the needs of individual citizens other than the superrich.  It has too few jobs, too many home mortgage foreclosures, too much student debt, too many people living in poverty, too many without health insurance, and increasingly does too little to support the poor and middle class.

The emperor truly has no clothes.  The myth of American exceptionalism is all a big lie!

What few seem to realize is that OWS is simply blowback from what Mie Augier and James G. March call the Golden Age of business schools in their recent book The Roots, Rituals, and Rhetorics of Change: North American Business Schools After the Second World War.

After devoting 322 pages to hyping the positive effects of the 1950-1970 takeover of graduate schools of business by the free market technocrats, the authors abruptly conclude their book with the following final sentence.  “The Golden Age was transformed to a significant extent into an era of the glorification of huge fortunes and of those who accumulated them, the anointing of greed as a social virtue, and the substitution of the lessons of experience for the lessons of analysis and research.”

It’s almost as though they wrote an entire book about the revolution which took place in business education and failed to notice that the seeds of destruction which have led to the precipitous decline in the American Empire were planted, cultivated, and nourished in graduate schools of business over the past sixty years.  The mathematical models, economic theories, behavioral science, and increased professionalism of American business schools have all played an important role in the creation, moral justification, and implementation of a culture of technofascism which Occupy Wall Street is now rebelling against.

As a result of the training which they received in leading MBA programs, professional managers on Wall Street and in Corporate America have been able to take scientifically based hustling, greed, and their own personal salaries and bonuses to heretofore unimaginable levels.

In the words of Eric Fromm:

Modern man has transformed himself into a commodity; he experiences his life energy as an investment with which he should make the highest profit, considering his position and the situation on the personality market.  He is alienated from himself, from his fellow men, and from nature.  His main aim is profitable exchange of his skills, knowledge, and of himself, his “personality package” with others who are equally intent on a fair and profitable exchange.  Life has no goal except the one to move, no principle except the one of fair exchange, no satisfaction except the one to consume.

And graduate schools of business have played no small part in making all of this happen!  The Harvard Business School model is under siege, and appropriately so.

Thomas H. Naylor

April 5, 2012

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Founder of the Second Vermont Republic and Professor Emeritus of Economics at Duke University; co-author of Affluenza, Downsizing the USA, and The Search for Meaning.

www.vermontrepublic.org.

For years, activists from around Vermont have sunk an enormous amount of time and energy into the campaign to close the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant. Working within the system, they painstakingly built support for the plant’s decommissioning, and, following the 2010 election, it appeared that their strategy had paid off. The Legislature and Governor concurred that Entergy’s contract would not be renewed, and that March 21, 2012 would be Vermont Yankee’s final day of operation.

Unfortunately, instead of respecting the will of the people of Vermont, as expressed through our elected representatives, Entergy decided to bring the Federal Government into the scrap on their side. Overruling our representatives, the Nuclear “Regulatory” Commission; a body which has been described by Princeton Professor Frank N. von Hipple as “a textbook example of the problem of regulatory capture“; granted the plant a twenty-year extension, and a Federal court has ruled that the state does not have the right to shut it down.

For many Vermonters, this situation is highlighting the state of affairs about which many of us in the independence movement have been working to raise awareness. On the one hand are the accountable, human-scale politics of Vermont, in which legislators are accountable to their communities on account of the fact that they represent only a few thousand people each. Since community reputation matters more than mass media presence, our legislators aren’t vulnerable to the usual tactic by which corporate interests hijack the political process (massive campaign donations), and so, despite its best efforts, Entergy has been unable to twist our government into acting against the interests of Vermonters.

In response to this reality, they turned to the corrupt, unaccountable, pay-to-play Federal Government to shield their profits. In contrast to our state legislators, Congress is wholly reliant upon corporate money to fund their re-election campaigns, and the Nuclear Regulatory Agency is widely known to have a revolving door in which industry insiders become regulators and vice versa.

As a result, this situation offers a rare moment of clarity into the way our political system really functions. On the one hand is the community-based, human-scale politics of Vermont striving to protect the interests and enact the will of its constituents; on the other is a faceless, unaccountable leviathan that is clearly willing to sacrifice the right of the people of Vermont to defend their safety and well-being in order to protect the government-subsidized profits of an out-of-state corporation for another twenty years. This situation fundamentally pierces the myth that the Federal Government is still government by and for the people; instead, it has become government by and for the powerful, in which the will of the people can be ignored seemingly without consequence.

As such, the Vermont Yankee fiasco represents a fundamental crisis of legitimacy for the Federal Government in the eyes of many Vermonters, and it is therefore a crucial opportunity for those of us who advocate for decentralization and Vermont’s independence to offer our alternative. The choice is clear: imperial corporate tyranny or human-scale democracy.

I call on supporters of Vermont independence to join me in standing for the latter in a “Free Vermont” contingent at the March 22nd actions against VY in Brattleboro beginning at 11am.

Bring flags, signs, etc., and let’s spread the word that if the Feds don’t respect the will of the people of Vermont, the people of Vermont might stop respecting the will of the Federal Government!

From: middleburyinstitute@yahoogroups.com [mailto:middleburyinstitute@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Director@MiddleburyInstitute,org
Sent: Monday, March 12, 2012 4:41 PM
To: middleburyinstitute@yahoogroups.com
Cc: jkelas@aol.com
Subject: [Middlebury Institute] Occupy Secession

Colleagues:
This letter was just sent to us, and I have responded wishing them well, as a part of our movement and particularly as the first part of the Occupy movement to remove itself from the reformism that so taints the others, and I have urged them to make their opposition to the American Empire explicit.  If you hear from or meet up with any of them, stand with them in solidarity and encourage them on.
Kirkpatrick Sale
Director@MiddleburyInstitute.org

Dear Middlebury Institute,

We represent Occupy Secession. We are writing to address the seemingly forgotten option of seceding from the United States of America. In this instance secession means, basically, at best, our people seceding from our government. It has become apparent our overlords aren’t listening to outrage and have no regard for decency. We’ve concluded we must renounce citizenship. Secession is the most appealing frontier for those who cannot tolerate injustice in their name. Secession is an important form of protest against the fascist USoA government. It can also be refuge and safe harbor for an abused nation such as this one. We intend to clarify the details of this most complex undertaking by working as a team and reaching out to people who were into this mindset before us. Once involved parties are informed and in some form of agreement about what the modern secession movement entails then we can call for public support. As it stands there are dozens of secessionist organizations across the USoA and they’re each receiving this letter. We hope to open a dialogue and begin networking. There is a good foundation already in place upon which we will create a bold new action. Our people are in areas like SoCal, Texas, NYC, Delaware, West Virginia, Savannah, New England, Vermont, New Hampshire, The Dakotas, and everywhere else to a very real extent. When these organizations come together they can achieve autonomy for whoever wants it. The severity of this situation is somewhat self-evident. We don’t owe critics any explanations, but we should invite productive discourse. There is a task, a purpose, an urgency, and an opportunity. We, free honest people, are allies. This letter is going out to activists, social justice organizations, various established nations within USoA borders, tribes, radical collectives, ordinary people, Occupy, and many different demographics in between. Feedback from this project will be filtered for sensitive material then made public via facebook- Occupy Secession- to help us learn from each other; there is nothing to hide- secession is our right. OS warmly welcomes your input. Our public relation guy thought of a few ice breakers we can use to get to know each other. Why not tell us; who you are- really…., where you call home- roughly…., what your most pertinent concerns are, if you know any rare and relevant information that will benefit the collective on our journey to sovereignty, some ideas how we can benefit each other, is there anything specific you or your people can do to benefit the whole, if you need some kind of help from us, if there is anything important you know that we should all know- knowledge is power, what got you into the secession movement, to what ends do you wish to see our means succeed? Please stay in close contact with us.

Sincerely,

Occupy Secession

occupysecession@hotmail.com

3/12/2012

Why was anyone surprised that a federal judge recently ruled that the state of Vermont does not have the right to decide whether or not an aging, leaky, unsafe nuclear power plant operated by an out-of-state company with a record of lying and misrepresenting the truth should be allowed to continue operating in Vermont?  The United States Government is best known for preempting the rights of states and ordinary citizens, not granting them more freedom and control over their own destinies.  There was never any evidence whatsoever to suggest that the federal government would rule otherwise.

Neither Vermont’s mindless Congressional delegation nor its Pollyannaish Governor, Peter Shumlin, seem to have considered the very likely probability that a federal court would indeed rule against Vermont in the Vermont Yankee case.  Furthermore, there appears to be no backup plan whatsoever.

Governor Shumlin often refers to Vermont’s Congressional delegation as the “best in the nation.”  But Senator Patrick Leahy, Senator Bernie Sanders, and Congressman Peter Welch are first and foremost loyalists of the American Empire and this loyalty always trumps their loyalty to Vermont.  All one need do is examine their unconditional support for the Pentagon and all of its nasty little wars everywhere.

As long as starry-eyed Vermonters blindly continue to pledge unconditional allegiance to the “home of the free and the land of the brave,” the U.S. Government will continue to usurp their rights.

There is one and only one morally justifiable alternative to empire – secession and peaceful dissolution.

Imagine…Free Vermont

Thomas H. Naylor

January 23, 2012

Founder of the Second Vermont Republic and Professor Emeritus of Economics at Duke University; co-author of Affluenza, Downsizing the USA, and The Search for Meaning.

www.vermontrepublic.org.

So taken by the Occupy Wall Street movement is Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders that he has proposed a Constitutional amendment addressing two of the major concerns of many OWSers, corporate personhood and political campaign finance reform.  Sanders recently introduced “The Saving American Democracy Amendment” which would ban corporate personhood and political campaign contributions by corporations.  To help him promote the amendment Sanders has been joined by two of his Vermont buddies, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream fame.

Although Bernie loves to rail against Corporate America, there is considerable evidence to suggest that his concern about corporate personhood is limited to corporations outside of Vermont.  He never utters an unkind word against companies such as General Dynamics, General Electric, IBM, and Lockheed Martin which have a significant presence in Vermont.  When Ben & Jerry’s sold out to Unilever, corporate personhood was a nonissue.

Less than a week after Sanders introduced his corporate personhood amendment, a project on which he had been working with Lockheed Martin, the largest defense contractor in the world, came to fruition.  On December 12^th Sanders announced the establishment of a new $15 million Center for Energy Transformation and Innovation at the University of Vermont in Burlington.  The Center will be financed by a $9 million grant from the U.S.  government-owned Sandia National Laboratories, a $3 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy, and $3 million grant from the State of Vermont.

Just in case you don’t recall, Sandia designs, builds, and tests weapons of mass destruction, e.g., nuclear weapons.  It traces its historical origins back to the Manhattan Project in World War II.  Sandia is operated under contract by Lockheed Martin.

The Center will engage in research related to energy efficiency, renewable energy, electric grids, so-called smart electric meters, and electric vehicles.  Although it is unlikely that any nuclear bombs will be designed at UVM, Sandia clearly intends to trade heavily on the good name of the University of Vermont as a clean, green, nonviolent, peace loving institution of higher education.

Whether Lockheed Martin engages in corporate personhood in Vermont is subject to debate.  However, its political relations with Senator Sanders, Senator Patrick Leahy, and Congressman Peter Welch are impeccable.  All three members of the Vermont Delegation support replacing the Vermont Air National Guard’s aging fleet of F-16s with Lockheed Martin F-35 fighter jets at a cost of $115 million each.  They also support converting Burlington International Airport into a center from which to launch unmanned Lockheed Martin drone aircraft.  Major General Michael Dubie, head of the Vermont National Guard, who recently received an honorary doctorate from UVM, also supports both of these projects.  It’s all a very cozy relationship.

Just as Senator Sanders’ interest in corporate personhood seems to lie primarily outside of Vermont, so too does his support for democracy.  For example, he showed no interest in the fact that the UVM Faculty Senate was never asked for its opinion about whether the University should get in bed with a manufacturer of atomic bombs.  Nor did he show much concern for whether the people of Burlington would like to have a nice weapons of mass destruction company in their own backyard.

The Saving American Democracy Amendment is a complete sham, taken seriously by no one, including its author Senator Sanders.  Such an amendment has no chance whatsoever of being passed by the Congress which is owned, operated, and controlled by Wall Street and Corporate America, who like things just the way they are.

The real question is, “Who is being conned by whom?”

Thomas H. Naylor

December 14, 2011

Founder of the Second Vermont Republic and Professor Emeritus of Economics at Duke University; co-author of Affluenza, Downsizing the USA, and The Search for Meaning.

1. Benedict XVI  –   Pope
2. Ben S. Bernanke –  Federal Reserve Chrmn
3. Lloyd C. Blankfein  –  Goldman Sachs Chrmn
4. Hillary Clinton  –  Secretary of State
5. Rahm Emanuel  –   Mayor of Chicago
6. Bill Gates   –   Microsoft Founder
7. Stephen Harper  –  Canadian Prime Minister
8. Angela Merkel  –  German Chancellor
9. Rupert Murdoch   –  News Corporation Chrmn
10. Benjamin Netanyahu  –   Israeli Prime Minister
11. Grover Norquist   –   Americans for Tax Reform
12. Barack Obama  –   President
13. Bill O’Reilly  —   Fox News Talk Show Host
14. Larry Page  —   Google CEO
15. Leon Panetta   –   Secretary of Defense
16. David Petraeus  –   CIA Director
17. Bernie Sanders   –   Vermont Senator
18. Nicholas Sarkozy  –   French President
19. Robson Walton  –   Wal-Mart Chairman
20. Mark Zuckerberg  –   Facebook CEO

When I team taught a course on corporate strategy back in 1980 at the Yale School of Management with economist Martin Shubik and former New York Times chief financial officer Leonard Forman, I never dreamed I would be invited back to Yale thirty years later to be the keynote speaker for a debate on, of all things, secession.  Yet on the evening of November 9^th, the Yale Political Union, the largest student organization on campus, held such a debate to consider the resolution, “Be it resolved that the United States of America be peacefully dissolved.”  One can’t even imagine how long it must have been since a politically correct Ivy League college organized a major debate on secession?

Founded in 1934 as a debate society, members of the Yale Political Union include Democrats, Republicans, Socialists, and others.  Each member belongs to one of seven political parties: either the Liberal Party, the Party of the Left, the Independent Party, the Federalist Party, the Conservative Party, the Tory Party, or the Party of the Right.  Past presidents have included Senator John Kerry, New York Governor George Pataki, and writers William F. Buckley and Fareed Zakaria.  The YPU’s list of past speakers reads like a veritable Who’s Who in American Politics.  Right wing writer and darling of Fox News, Ann Coulter, was there a couple of weeks earlier.

My charge that the U.S. Government is an immoral, undemocratic, over sized, materialistic, unsustainable, ungovernable, unfixable military machine run by and for the benefit of the superrich precipitated a lively and very intense response from the bright-eyed, bushy-tailed Yalies.

The liberal Democrats and the neoconservatives, both apologists for big government, didn’t like what I had to say one bit.  The rebuttal speaker, a young Filipino, made the case for America’s role as the global policeman.  The fate of America’s nuclear arsenal was the primary concern of another participant.  A conservative woman worried about the possible impact on copyright protection.  My favorite response came from a student from Rochester, N.Y., who feared that dissolution of the American Empire might threaten the future of the Super Bowl, which he considered to be an integral part of American exceptionalistm.

A lot more students came to my defense than I had expected.  They included several libertarians, some hard core leftists, and a Mexican socialist.  One student even claimed to be a fan of the Second Vermont Republic.

What was particularly gratifying about the debate was the extent of the engagement of these very bright, articulate Yale undergraduates in a conversation about a politically incorrect topic which had been summarily rejected by most Americans for over 150 years.  There seemed to be a willingness to think outside of the box and openly discuss heretofore unimaginable political options such as radical decentralization, Internet based direct democracy, secession, and even peaceful dissolution.

Many of the Yale debaters appeared to have been influenced by the Occupy Wall Street movement.  Although not everyone was in agreement with the goals and tactics of OWS, the movement has produced a tailwind of support for political change which was clearly evident in the debate hall.

After two hours of intense discussion, there was a motion to end debate and vote on the resolution.  Much to my surprise 45 percent of the participants voted to dissolve the United States.  Maybe there is hope after all, if that many Yalies opt for secession rather than empire.

Thomas H. Naylor

November 14, 2011

Founder of the Second Vermont Republic and Professor Emeritus of Economics at Duke University; co-author of Affluenza, Downsizing the USA, and The Search for Meaning.  www.vermontrepublic.org