Vermont Republic

Kairos: A Greek word for a very special time fraught with decisive consequences for good or evil when momentous things are happening, new possibilities arise, more degrees of freedom emerge, and the opportunity to seize the moment appears.  A time for renewal and nonviolent action when the forces of light rise …

It has become increasingly obvious that the only difference between Barack Obama and George W. Bush is that the famous Bush smirk has been replaced by the Obama smile.  The neoconservatism of Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and Bill O’Reilly has given way to the neoliberalism of Bill Clinton, Timothy Geithner, …

Nearly three years before I moved to Vermont, on October 9, 1990, the Bennington Banner published my article entitled “Should the U.S. Be Downsized?”  Four years later in Challenge(Nov.-Dec. 1994) I wrote: “The time has come both for the individual states and the federal government to begin planning the rational downsizing …

Sean Connery thinks the Scottish nation is a bonnie notion. How about Spain’s Basque country becoming a REAL country? And what’s wrong with a People’s Republic of Vermont? Kosovo‘s looming independence raises all those questions and more. For starters: Why is statehood OK for some people but frowned on for …

After a hiatus of nearly 150 years following the Civil War, over a million Americans have recently rediscovered the word secession, one of the most toxic, politically incorrect words in American English.  Never mind the fact that our nation was actually born out of secession from England back in 1776. Since …

Dubbed “Tom Paine for the 21st Century” by Utne magazine’s Jay Walljasper, Thomas H. Naylor (1936-2012) of Charlotte, Vermont was Professor Emeritus of Economics at Duke University, as well as a writer and a political activist. He passed away on December 12, 2012, after complications resulting from a stroke, and is survived by his wife …

With the publication of John Lewis Gaddis’s new book George F. Kennan:  An American Life(Penguin Press, 2011), the name of the former dean of the American diplomatic corps is once again on the national radar screen.  When George F. Kennan died on March 17, 2005, at the age of 101, few …

Human killing is an act of nihilism. Violence begets more violence, not the other way around. By whose authority other than the law of the jungle do those who kill or sanction killing set themselves up as a prosecutor, judge, and executioner? War is the ultimate form of having—owning, possessing, …