Vermont Says -- NO!
In Vermont, a Town-Meeting revolt over Iraq war
On Tuesday, one-fifth of Vermont towns will consider what role the state's National Guard should play in the war. By Sara B. Miller
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0228/p01s04-uspo.html?s=hns
...............................
Those without Vermont roots -- mine are half there and half from upstate NY -- will not likely know that Vermont traditionally has been the renegade state, unwilling to get along/go along. My middle name is Allen and one of my alleged collateral roots ancestors, Ethan Allen, not only fought the battle of Ticonderoga, but also wrote one of the first American atheist tracts. Vermonters have always been proud of their practice of judging and valuing people as individuals, not as members of groups -- favored or disfavored. My Vermont childhood playmates there were descendants of native Americans, as was my oldest and dearest friend, Dan Huden, whose father, John Huden, was an expert both on native American affairs and education at UVM before he became the president of a Vermont teachers college and a sort of second father to me as well as Dan's. He early on spotted formal academic testing as a fraudulent device for favoring the well off and putting down children whose educations had been deprived of the necessities for them to compete on anything like an equal basis.
Howard Dean, as the governor of Vermont, carried on with the Vermont traditions respecting equal opportunity. I pay taxes there which are higher because Vermont reassigns property tax revenues from wealthier to poorer communities to achieve per pupil parity, and, thus, equal opportunity from the starting point of a child's education. I have high hopes that Dean will nudge the Democratic party back towards its root concerns with liberty and justice FOR ALL and away from the brutality of the Republican plutocracy in the making, which too many Democrats have been emulating as Republicans lite! We are watching the early stages of neo fascism here in Amerika -- and abroad where we would impose the worst aspects of American 'ownership' on developing nations. This is nothing new by the way, as we have been been supporting corrupt regimes out there in the interests of our corporations 'owning' the resources of others for more than a century -- United Fruit to our oil companies funding juntas here, there and elsewhere and sanctioning the murders of human rights and democratic activists (e.g. in Nigeria) who got in way of our grabbing their national resources -- now Iraq and next Iran?
Incidentally, as one trained in political as well as legal philosophy, I am increasingly appalled by the brutality of the neocons who are more than willing to send the children of THEM off to do their dirty work. Their neo-Hobbist-via-Leo-Strauss mentality is extremely dangerous:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Strauss
http://home.earthlink.net/~karljahn/Strauss.htm
The frontispiece of the original text of the Leviathan portrayed a prince whose armor on close inspection was made up of leaves of mail portraying little soldiers presumably to be sacrificed while protecting their Sovereign -- who in the Hobbesian version would "pretermit" them only those liberties that he deemed suitable -- for sheep -- eating and providing for their shepherd whatever he deigned to be in his sovereign interest. Hobbes despised the pending doctrines of natural rights of his times and pretended no sense of any equal worth of persons as commanded by their shepherd peace-keeper. Sound familiar? We are watching the evolution in the U.S. of a class/caste system that condemns the poor to underpaid labor (WalMarted, if not Enroned) and to early deaths (Bush's proposed sabotage of Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security) so as to benefit our massively wealthy CEOs and stock holders with lowered taxes? Corporate America has no more to do with democracy than did Nazi Germany's I.G. Farben!
http://webletter.net/cybrary/Facts.aft.perp.igpact.html
The neocon ideology dominating Bush, Inc. is purely self-interested well paid elitism run amuck with contemptuous word tampering comparable to that pioneered by Joseph Goebbels and regurgitated upon the public by our Murdocked media: http://www.alternet.org/story/18242
We are going to democratize our disfavored regimes of this world? So was Hitler -- he called his program national socialism. "Shock and Awe" has a hauntingly similar ring to "Blitzkrieg!" And then there are our American gulags -- or should one now say Koncentration Kamps?
http://www.apfn.org/apfn/camps.htm
Comments?
On Tuesday, one-fifth of Vermont towns will consider what role the state's National Guard should play in the war. By Sara B. Miller
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0228/p01s04-uspo.html?s=hns
...............................
Those without Vermont roots -- mine are half there and half from upstate NY -- will not likely know that Vermont traditionally has been the renegade state, unwilling to get along/go along. My middle name is Allen and one of my alleged collateral roots ancestors, Ethan Allen, not only fought the battle of Ticonderoga, but also wrote one of the first American atheist tracts. Vermonters have always been proud of their practice of judging and valuing people as individuals, not as members of groups -- favored or disfavored. My Vermont childhood playmates there were descendants of native Americans, as was my oldest and dearest friend, Dan Huden, whose father, John Huden, was an expert both on native American affairs and education at UVM before he became the president of a Vermont teachers college and a sort of second father to me as well as Dan's. He early on spotted formal academic testing as a fraudulent device for favoring the well off and putting down children whose educations had been deprived of the necessities for them to compete on anything like an equal basis.
Howard Dean, as the governor of Vermont, carried on with the Vermont traditions respecting equal opportunity. I pay taxes there which are higher because Vermont reassigns property tax revenues from wealthier to poorer communities to achieve per pupil parity, and, thus, equal opportunity from the starting point of a child's education. I have high hopes that Dean will nudge the Democratic party back towards its root concerns with liberty and justice FOR ALL and away from the brutality of the Republican plutocracy in the making, which too many Democrats have been emulating as Republicans lite! We are watching the early stages of neo fascism here in Amerika -- and abroad where we would impose the worst aspects of American 'ownership' on developing nations. This is nothing new by the way, as we have been been supporting corrupt regimes out there in the interests of our corporations 'owning' the resources of others for more than a century -- United Fruit to our oil companies funding juntas here, there and elsewhere and sanctioning the murders of human rights and democratic activists (e.g. in Nigeria) who got in way of our grabbing their national resources -- now Iraq and next Iran?
Incidentally, as one trained in political as well as legal philosophy, I am increasingly appalled by the brutality of the neocons who are more than willing to send the children of THEM off to do their dirty work. Their neo-Hobbist-via-Leo-Strauss mentality is extremely dangerous:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Strauss
http://home.earthlink.net/~karljahn/Strauss.htm
The frontispiece of the original text of the Leviathan portrayed a prince whose armor on close inspection was made up of leaves of mail portraying little soldiers presumably to be sacrificed while protecting their Sovereign -- who in the Hobbesian version would "pretermit" them only those liberties that he deemed suitable -- for sheep -- eating and providing for their shepherd whatever he deigned to be in his sovereign interest. Hobbes despised the pending doctrines of natural rights of his times and pretended no sense of any equal worth of persons as commanded by their shepherd peace-keeper. Sound familiar? We are watching the evolution in the U.S. of a class/caste system that condemns the poor to underpaid labor (WalMarted, if not Enroned) and to early deaths (Bush's proposed sabotage of Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security) so as to benefit our massively wealthy CEOs and stock holders with lowered taxes? Corporate America has no more to do with democracy than did Nazi Germany's I.G. Farben!
http://webletter.net/cybrary/Facts.aft.perp.igpact.html
The neocon ideology dominating Bush, Inc. is purely self-interested well paid elitism run amuck with contemptuous word tampering comparable to that pioneered by Joseph Goebbels and regurgitated upon the public by our Murdocked media: http://www.alternet.org/story/18242
We are going to democratize our disfavored regimes of this world? So was Hitler -- he called his program national socialism. "Shock and Awe" has a hauntingly similar ring to "Blitzkrieg!" And then there are our American gulags -- or should one now say Koncentration Kamps?
http://www.apfn.org/apfn/camps.htm
Comments?
posted by Ed Kent at 3:49 PM
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