November's Secessionist Developments

Continuing with the theme of the graphic I left up on my blog for most of November - with a new graphic at the left.

Frankly, there are so many secession google alerts coming in, I'd have to give up my wikipYupYup editing addiction to keep track of them. (Yes, I'm trying to develop a secession addiction.) But I cover the three that seemed of special interest to me: the 3rd Secession Convention and two high profile predictions of coming chaos and even the break up of the United States

First, fifty-five people attended the mid-November 2008 Third North American Secessionist Convention in Manchester, New Hampshire. That number hardly reflects the growing number of people looking at secession as the way of dealing with a bankrupt government that has destroyed the economy and still spends taxpayers trillions more into debt to try to exert military control over the world. Secession and break up of the United States is a movement (or a bunch of movements!) whose time is on the near horizon. My main concern is to keep it focused on tolerance, good democratic processes and nonviolence, and not become just another battle between macho men over who can prove his manhood with the most bloody violence!

Below is the first of 3 videos at the Middlebury Institute YouTube page. Below that are some excerpts convention reports.

Given that the convention happened just after the 2008 presidential elections, only the Associated Press carried a short story, unlike the longer stories carried by a number of publications in 2006 and 2007. The Burlington Free Press wrote: "We have lame policies. We have a lame president. We have a lame Congress. And we can expect lame results," said speaker Gerald Celente of Rhinebeck, N.Y., founder of the Trends Research Institute. "We envision America breaking up the way the former Soviet Union broke up." (More below.) Thomas Naylor of the Vermont Republic secession group said that the separation would mean Vermonters could "disengage from the Wall Street global economy" and "cease contributing tax dollars to the federal government's $700 billion bailout and its military operations."... "Naylor called on U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., to resign, run for governor of Vermont, and lead the state to independence. The senator Thursday declined the offer, saying through his spokesman thanks, but no thanks. 'Obviously I do not believe in secession,' Sanders said in an e-mail."

The libertarian Free State Observer noted that "Kirkpatrick Sale, director of the Middlebury Institute and organizer of the annual event, makes a point of referring to it as a convention, not a conference, because its attendees are delegates of various organizations, just as the First and Second Constitutional Conventions of what would become the USA were attended by representatives of various states and territories." Its report included a long detailed description of the speakers. The convention issued the Manchester Declaration which repeated many of the themes mentioned above.

However, radical political decentralization and secession made it into the news anyway. In November a lot was written in mainstream news articles and varous blogs about Gerald Celente's predictions that by 2012 America will become an undeveloped nation, that there will be a revolution marked by food riots, squatter rebellions, tax revolts and job marches, and that holidays will be more about obtaining food, not gifts. Linda Moulton Howe interviews Celente, including on that topic, here. In the video below Celente says government has to shrink, but doesn't mention the U.S. breaking up -- or maybe FoxNews edited that part out!


Russian professor of economics Igor Panarin also got a lot of mainstream news coverage, including on CNN and/or MSNBC cable news, for saying that because of the coming economic depression the United States will break up into six separate states in the near future. This video is from Russia Today.