The United States of Reagan?

I don't normally spend much time commenting on out of state secesher douchebags but this has some relevance to the Rob Williams Vermont secession movement. Yes, I know, they're essentially nonexistent at this point but there is an element in this story that ties them somewhat to the other douchenozzle that I've found. Right Wing Watch posted this yesterday:

Author Wants Southern States To Secede Over Gay Rights, Name New Country 'Reagan'

SUBMITTED BY Brian Tashman on Wednesday, 10/22/2014 12:05 pm

Conservative columnist and former Reagan administration aide Douglas MacKinnon is out with a new book calling for Southern states to secede…again.

While speaking yesterday with Janet Mefferd about his book, “The Secessionist States of America: The Blueprint for Creating a Traditional Values Country…Now,” MacKinnon called for a movement of states, starting with South Carolina, Georgia and Florida, to establish a new country that will adhere to the Religious Right’s political agenda.

Texas, MacKinnon explained, was not included in his secessionist blueprint because “there have been a number of incursions into Texas and other places from some of the folks in Mexico.”

He added that the South had “seceded legally” and “peacefully” during the Civil War, but greedy Northerners like President Lincoln “waged an illegal war that was in fact not declared against the South after the South basically did what we’re talking about in this book now in terms of peacefully, legally and constitutionally leaving the union.”

After lamenting that “for whatever reason the leaders that we’re picking are deciding not to stand firmly for traditional values,” MacKinnon repeated his view that a new country should be formed, and even proposed an “interim name” for the ultraconservative breakaway nation: “Reagan.”

MacKinnon specifically cited advances in gay rights as a reason for Southern states to leave the U.S. and create a new country.

MacKinnon strongly defended the South for its role in what he called “The War Between The States,” saying that Religious Right activists should endorse the secessionist movement as a way to “protect our faith.”

Williams, a member of the adjunct faculty staff at Burlington, VT's Champlain College, shares much of MacKinnon's loony tunes historical revisionism regarding the Civil War and President Lincoln and, similarly, Williams' new iteration of the Second Vermont Republic shares MacKinnon's reservations over the possible constitutional settlement of same sex marriage issue.

Although the Vermont Supreme Court and Vermont's legislature had settled the issue, Williams' tiny clown car group still feels that an unconstitutional referendum is available to further the cause of discrimination against lesbian and gay families. This from his website:

"(T)he Second Vermont Republic takes no official position on such controversial issues as... gay marriage. (This is an issue) for the citizens of the independent republic to decide."

That's it, Rob? To Hell with Vermont's present constitution? Civil rights in the new Vermont Republic will be up to a popular vote? What else aren't you telling us? Given the its penchant to majority rule, are you possibly making plans to have Vermont join MacKinnon's United Klan States of Reagan?

Meanwhile, as Rob schemes to shred the Vermont Constitution, his co-conspirator in an secret, outlandish plan to reconstitute a disbanded arm of Vermont governance, the Vermont Council of Censors, the rocket scientist Gary Flomenhoft has once again floated over at Rob's hate blog (no, I won't link to it) his longstanding dream to nationalize everything in Vermont that isn't nailed to your home - that means your woodlot or sugar bush (Fact: Half of Vermont's forests are local family owned), your land, and even your air. Yes, he even has a plan for your air. No doubt there'll be a tax on the meter when you top up the air in your tires at the gas station.

Having failed at creating a state bank in the last legislative session, Flomenhoft has doubled downed and proposes Venezuela-like to seize vast expanses of private property while suggesting that every Vermonter would get a cut so it's okay to steal. Hear that flopping sound, Gary? That's the sound of your new plan is making even before it leaves the gate.

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The Banality of Treason

For years I've written about the Vermont secession movement and its unbroken string of failures; from its multiple, miserably failed political campaigns (there are two secession supporters in this year's Vermont gubernatorial race, Peter Diamondstone and Emily Peyton, who are perpetual also rans who poll in the single or fractional digits); to its repeated attempts to infuse a virulent form of anti-Semitism into Vermont's political discussion; to seditious plans to go around Vermont's constitutionally mandated form of governance; to promoting crackpot electoral schemes to "vote out" all 30 sitting members of the Vermont Senate and replace them with seceshers - result: 0 of "The Thirty" voted out; to maintaining open alliances with racist and homophobic secessionist groups around the country; to spreading conspiracy theory loopiness, like the 9/11 Truther/inside job crap and speculation about contrails and NASA engaged in mineral exchanges on the dark side of the Moon with aliens for their technology (yeah, ya read that right); to outright lies about Vermont history such as the claim that Vermont was a participant in the seditious Hartford Convention organized by New England's then 1% (the Vermont legislature sent no representatives and the only Windham County Vermonter to attend paid his own way and left no record of whatever his "participation" might have been at the secret convention); or, perhaps most significantly, that the "independent state" of Vermont, which just happened to be the term used by each of the thirteen original colonies to describe themselves, ever functioned as a "republic" in any real way - the only act that even remotely mimicked that of a free and "independent" republic was the secret Haldimand Affair negotiations, which was nothing more than an treasonous attempt, and so considered by the Vermont state legislature, by the Allen brothers, Joseph Fay and Thomas Chittenden to extend their land holdings and which immediately fell apart with the outbreak of peace and the initial creation of the Union. Maybe that's where Rob Williams Gary "The Rocket Scientist" Flomenhoft and their troop of dullards got the idea to set up a shadow governmental agency that no one was suppose to know about, anymore than the Continental Congress was ever aware in any relevant way of a so-called First Vermont Republic. Also, illicitly declaring a "provisional" capital at a B&B in the hamlet of Hancock, VT after their disastrous showing at the polls in the 2010 election. This is just a short list of the crazy that permeates the sesechers treasonous bent.

Treason has always had a special place in the minds of desperate, power driven types. It's what drove the crackpot, anti-Semite who founded the Second Vermont Republic, the Dixie singin' Thomas H. Naylor, to establish alliances with racists at the League of the South, an alliance that the present day baas of SVR, Rob Williams, has yet to renounce or denounce, as well as with a viciously homophobic South Carolina based evangelical hate group that called itself Christian Exodus. Naylor's shared dream with Canadian racist, anti-Semite and fascist Sebastian Ernst Ronin was the creation of a white homeland comprised of northern New England and the Canadian Maritime provinces that they proposed be called Novacadia.

Treason of a sort unpermitted by the U.S. Constitution is what drives present day secessionists, just as it did the traitors of the old Confederacy.

An anonymous post (not that there's anything wrong with that) at Burlington , VT's Champlain College adjunct faculty member Rob Williams' recently reactivated hate blog, the second coming of Naylor's SVR website, touts the results of the Reuters poll without mentioning that more than 53.3% of Americans oppose secession of any type, period.

Secession is not an legal option available to any and all who desire it. The White House has itself put the kibosh on the notion of any state seceding from the Union, as has the Supreme Court in Texas v. White. One need only look at a recent poll of suspect methodology that alleges that 23.9% of Americans " were strongly or provisionally inclined to leave the United States, and take their states with them."

Significantly, the Reuters poll also reports that of racist, hate motivated Tea Party types, 53% of their conservative ilk want secession. What Williams' secesher website also doesn't report is that the least amount of support in America, 19%, is what is found in New England. But we already knew that in Vermont since when Vermonters last had a chance to vote for a secesher gubernatorial candidate, the Brawny Towel guy reënactor and Connecticut native Dennis Steele, 99.24% of Vermonters voted in the only poll that really counts, an election, for someone other than the secesher candidate, which comes as no surprise since Williams got maybe 10 people to vote for the secesh candidate in his hometown of Waitsfield, VT (a number which probably doesn't include his wife Kate since she has publicly stated that she doesn't support his secesher plan).

Secession is not legal, therefore a secesher plan is treasonous even if you slap the lipstick of "peaceful" on it as Williams so often does.

The short observation is that Williams and his nutjob pals are traitors, plain and simple.

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Public Banksters - Part XV: Gwen Hallsmith's Claim of "Victory" This Spring Takes a Major Financial Hit This Past Week

*** Trigger Warning ***: The following content that may elicit symptoms of Post-Traumatic Public Banking Disorder!

For those of you following the state budget revenue shortfall here in Vermont, it'll come as no surprise that Governor Shumlin is proposing a 2.2% or $31 million dollar cut to the 2015 budget. Consensus is that untried and unproven programs take larger cuts so as to spare programs for elderly, children, the needy, and health related assistance programs. Recognizing this, the governor's office had at first recommended a cut of more than twice the 2.2 rate from the Vermont Enterprise Investment Fund. And if you're not familiar with the VEIF, it's an internal fund of the Vermont Treasurer Beth Pearce's office earmarked for business stimulus.

Executive Director of the California based Public Banking Institute and local Grand Poobah of Vermonters For A New Economy, Gwen "The Hacker Baiter" Hallsmith, has claimed it as her "victory" on the little watched Laura Flanders Show back in April which I reported on here. It's the program where the public banksters finally managed to get their beaks wet in the public funds water. But not everyone shares the enthusiasm for an "unproven program" getting parity with assistance programs that are proven to be direly needed and getting just about the same cut as those for needy. Some, like Chris Curtis, an attorney with Vermont Legal Aid, suggested via one published report on Wednesday that,

"... Newer programs, such as the $4.5 million Vermont Enterprise Investment Fund to incentivize businesses to remain or locate in Vermont, should be more ripe for scrutiny than established programs with proven track records. The administration has proposed trimming the fund by $250,000 as part of the rescission."

According to numerous other published and broadcasted reports the committee charged with making the tough choices about what gets cut, the Vermont Legislative Joint Fiscal Office, didn't agree with the governor's 5+% cut to what some call his IBM Enterprise Investment Fund (hardly the fund envisioned by the public banksters when the scale of what they were proposing to capitalize a public bank - $70 million - shrank to a nearly $4.5 golden handshake to an existing Vermont employer). The VLJFO quadrupled the cut to the program to nearly 21% or close to a cool million dollars.

As noted on WCAX:

"'Some agencies have a lot of other places to go and some of the smaller agencies have less places to go,' Vt. Finance and Management Commissioner Jim Reardon said."

"Lawmakers vetoed the governor's proposal to reduce assistance for those aging out of foster care and other human service cuts one day after getting an earful from constituents."

"The governor ultimately agreed to quadruple his planned reduction to the newly created enterprise fund, bringing the $4.5 million potential incentive package to retain IBM or bring in a successor company down to $3.5 million."

"'We think that is an important fund, but in the spirit of cooperating... We will concur with your recommendation,' Reardon said."
Source

So, after all the cutting of a program that people in and out of government are calling a fund for "IBM or... (it's) successor," me's a-wondering just what spin the public banksters primary spokesperson and unregistered lobbyist, Gwen Hallsmith, will put on the affair. Perhaps even more notably, the press is reporting that no Vermonter has applied for assistance from the fund.

Great work there, Gwen. All of that work resulted in fund primarily devoted to "assisting" one of the largest, most well healed employers in Vermont. I just can't wait to see what all your "work" gets for Vermonters in the next legislative session. Maybe a new, groundbreaking incentive program to fund Vermont Gas' 40% cost overrun and eminent domain claims that you could call the Vermont Farm & Residence Assistance Fund will get Vermonters closer to that anti-capitalist "new economy" you profess to so love too, eh Gwen? That seems like something that you and Gary "The Rocket Scientist" Flomenhoft" could pull off given your track record. Heh.

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Public Bankster - Part XIV: Going Postal?

After a brief hiatus, Vermont public banking doyenne and secession movement ally, Gwendolyn Hallsmith, "executive director" of something that calls itself The Public Banking Institute, as well as a principal of a handful of other e-paper hat outlets that exist primarily to exalt its members extremist agenda, has begun posting again.

This time, it's not about public banks (although I'm sure that isn't far from Gwen's mind) but, rather, postal banks.

Hallsmith is promoting, in addition to state run banking facilities, that the post office offer banking services. She points to Sen. Elizabeth Warren's (D-MA) post office bank proposal as the model with a link to an extremist website (where you can also get nifty ideas on how to improve your activism outreach, à la Cosmo, like stenciling streets and sidewalks with your message while riding your bicycle). What Hallsmith doesn't do is any hard research on the topic. If she'd gone just a little mainstream, she might have learned from a publication that practices real journalism that not everyone is so enthusiastic about Warren's idea. She might also have learned that postal banks have been found to engage in the same predatory fee practices as commercial banks. France's La Banque Postal is just one example; in 2010 it shared with ten other banks a 384,900,000 Euros fine for "colluding to charge unjustified fees on check processing," putting the lie to the notion that because something is "public" it automatically becomes "pure."

Perhaps if Hallsmith had perused the Internet beyond her usual extremist feeding grounds, (and, yes, Forbes and the Wall Street Journal are legitimate sources of insights that aren't rubber stamp references of her particular prejudices) she'd have found, say, The Motley Fool's snarky take on the postal bank proposal:

"Somehow an institution that can't profitably deliver the mail will do a better job handling people's money."

But, no, that'd be too apt to disrupt Hallsmith's anti-capitalist meme. No, she'll more likely convene a meeting at, say, The Donella Institute, invite a coterie of supporters and propose a "study" be done by a promoter of her hobbyhorse - I'm looking at you Gary "The Rocket Scientist" Flomenhoft - who'll retire to his own "institute" and generate a fact biased "study" that'll be peer reviewed by no one and will confirm that Hallsmith's "idea" is the best thing since Ben & Jerry's. Yeah, that's the ticket!

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Vermont Secessionist Losers and Their Trail of Broken Political Promises and Bullshit

"Never give up, Never give in, Never surrender"
"Senator" Robert "Needed Killin' " Wagner, November 13, 2012

With those words, two time loser for an Addison county Vermont state senate seat, closed his 2012 campaign, seemingly promising to rise again from its ashes to wage another fruitless campaign. He even immediately renamed his Facebook page, "Robert Wagner for Vermont Senate 2014" where on March 13, 2013 he wrote,

"I remain your candidate..."

Well, maybe not so much. That was the last thing he's posted on the matter. More than a year later, June's 2014 filing date for independent Senate candidates came and went with no petition submitted by Wagner. Even his "Senator Wagner" website has gone dark.

Likewise, Wagner's self-described "friend," the proudly misogynist and the inveterate anti-Semite at Rob Williams' hate blog, Dennis "Hit List" Morrisseau, also failed to register for an independent run for a Rutland county Vermont Senate seat but he still has a 2014 campaign website. Go figure.

Morrisseau was the architect of plan to replace each and every one of Vermont's senate incumbents with secesher Kool-Aid drinkers. I guess that's now on hold too.

In a fashion similar to Wagner's, Vermont's 2010 secesher gubernatorial candidate Dennis Steele, while acknowledging that more than 99% of Vermonters voted for someone else, pledged,

"Today represents a beginning, not an end. When I agreed to take on the difficult and exhausting task of running for Governor as an independent this year, I did so with the hopes that my actions would serve to help lay the foundations for a robust, grass-roots movement that will carry the message of a Free Vermont forward. Towards that end, I’ve been collaborating with several supporters to found a democratic, state-wide organization. Dedicated to spreading the ideas of Vermont Independence, providing support for Independence-minded candidates for public office, and organizing volunteer activities that both serve our neighbors and help lessen our communities’ dependence on the Federal Government, it will serve as our movement’s new center and engine of growth. It will be organized by county, and I encourage anyone who supported my campaign to get involved in their county committee."

And since then no one has heard shit from Dennis Steele. According to one published report, it indicates that he's presently engaged in peddling an addictive and possibly carcinogenic substance in the NEK. So much for "serv(ing)... neighbors" and reducing "dependence," eh?

After their miserable showing in 2010, the seceshers declared their "independence" and established a provisional capital in the sparsely populated central Vermont town of Hancock. Most of the VT secesher movement's luminaries attended the convening session of their, uh, congress - their hate blog publisher, Rob; Gary "The Rocket Scientist and Public Bankster" Flomenhoft; Matt "Never Won An Election Yet" Cropp; you know, the usual suspects.

A promised run by a Fairfax, VT secesher insider has also failed to materialize. Secesher outliers like "Terry" Jeroloman, Gus Jaccaci, James Merriman and Gaelan "Aliens-NASA Conspiracy on the Dark Side of the Moon" Brown are again sitting this election cycle out.

The fact is that the only secession supporters left running are kooks like Ben Eastwood, Emily Peyton and Peter Diamondstone (who raised secession in a debate with Bernie Sanders in 2012), and there isn't a snowball's chance in hell that any one of them will eke out more than a low single or fractional digit electoral result.

It's beginning to look more and more like Thomas Naylor's dream of an independent white homeland called the Second Vermont Republic or Novacadia or some such nonsense, is nearly as dead as he is.

"Ex nihilo, in nihilum"

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VTDigger Posts a Vermont Secessionist Bonehead's Energy Rant Without Disclosing That Hans O'Hanion Is A Secesher

A reader has pointed me to an Op-Ed commentary posted at VTDigger by Vermont secessionist Hans O'Hanion. O'Hanion's curricula vitae omits this fact, as well as O'Hanion's longtime association with his Charlotte neighbor, the still dead Dixie singin' anti-Semite and proponent of a white homeland comprised of northern New England and the Canadian Maritimes, Thomas H. Naylor.

Like Naylor, O'Hanion has major probs with our congressional delegation, state government and the average Vermonter's commitment to seeking a path to sustainable energy alternatives that don't involve dangerous nuclear power plants. O'Hanion's piece disparages average Vermonters in a major way because he's a scholar academic blowhard (Academic blowhards are a staple of the anti-Semitic and racist pan-secessionist movement). O'Hanion essentially argues that sustainable energy alternatives are all inferior to "safe" nuclear power modules. Remember, back before Three Mile Island, when the egghead blowhards told us that nuclear power plants were safe? O'Hanion can't seem to accept the decision of the vast majority of Vermonters that nuclear is definitely not something that they want in the energy mix. O'Hanion's chance of successfully peddling his nonsense in his lifetime is about the same as Naylor's dream of creating a white homeland in his lifetime, although he has succeeded in projecting the degree of contempt that Naylor had before he croaked for the average Vermonter.

Where this secesher nonsense involving O'Hanion and the utterly failed Vermont "independence" crap converges is in the ill-fated seditious attempt by a small group of Vermont secesher boneheads to reconstitute a state governmental branch that had been legally disbanded nearly a hundred and fifty years ago called the Vermont Council of Censors. The duties of the Council are now those of the Vermont Supreme Court. The "reconstitution" was proposed by scholar rocket scientist Gary Flomenhoft at a secesher meeting in May of 2009 at Goddard College. While the original Council members were elected by Vermonters, the "reconstituted" group was made up of self-selected appointees like Dennis "Hit List" Morrisseau, Not-So-Senator Robert "Needed Killin' " Wagner, and O'Hanion.

All this Vermont Council of Censors stupidity that was intended to oversee the legislation coming out of the General Assembly and the activities of the Governor's office came to a screeching halt when I exposed it in 2010 here.

I'm left wondering why the "diggers" at VTDigger left this out of O'Hanion's background description. Wouldn't it have helped readers to gauge how unhinged the following commentary would turn out to be?

O'Hanion has no, um, better booster than the publisher of the failed Vermont secesher hate blog, Rob Williams, who called O'Hanion:

"[an] enthusiastic supporter of Vermont independence"

At about the time O'Hanion and his cohorts were advancing their seditious plot, the late Julie Waters nailed it thusly:

"What used to be a movement that was looked at with at least some small amount of interest has now been completely discredited."
- Julie Waters, Monday, July 6, 2009

Shame on VTDigger for missing this very pertinent detail from their commentator O'Hanion's background.

(h/t Todd)

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Public Banksters - Part XII

This should probably be subtitled as the Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire edition.

Nearly a month ago the Executive Director of the California based Public Banking Institute and unregistered lobbyist for a small group calling itself Vermonters for a New Economy, Gwen Hallsmith, appeared on the little watched GRITtv's Laura Flanders show. (NB: Even public banking supporters describe Gwen's work as "Lobbying for Public Banking") Flanders is a self described journalist whose interviewing style is to repeat back a program guest's talking points in the form of a question. If you have 17:20 minutes to waste of your life, you can watch the entire interview here.

At the 1:10 mark in the Flanders Show vid Hallsmith says about the non-binding public banking article the she and her little group managed to get onto a handful of Town Meeting warrants,

"It was great to hear all the returns coming in from around the state, 'cause towns all over the state voted for it. It wasn't just a little cluster here or there."

Holy whooper, Gwen! That's precisely what the results showed. Perhaps a "smattering" of towns would have been more accurate. Most of the less than a score of towns (out of more than 200) are clustered in north central Vermont, and in most of those they were only one or two towns in an entire county; no county (that's five or more than a third of Vermont's counties) along the entire New York State border had a town that considered the public banking article. Two towns each in the two southeastern counties considered the public banking article and not all of them supported it.

At the 14:27 mark of the vid Hallsmith delivers another of her misrepresentations that has been soundly refuted by Vermont Treasurer Beth Pearce,

"(W)e discovered in our (so-called) study is that existing state lending agencies already have plenty of unrestricted assets that could be used to capitalize the state bank. They have more than what would be required for a state bank. There's no additional bonding or capitalization needed."

Of course, Flanders let this stinker go by without a challenge or mention of the fact that it has been repeatedly refuted by state officials. Treasurer Pearce clearly states in her report to the Senate Committee on Government Operations of February 5, 2014 that,

"Capitalization would be expensive." Source

Also joining Treasurer Pearce in refuting the claims that were then being made by the public banksters in an October 23, 2013 VTDigger piece,

"VHFA (Vermont Housing Finance Agency) director Sarah Carpenter is not convinced about the merits of public banking.

“I’m a little perplexed about how that group thinks they’re going to get the capital,” Carpenter said. “Most of the money comes in as taxes and goes out as paying bills. So I’m not sure how they would have access to long-term capital, which is critical to most lending activities. Source

The so-called "study" that Hallsmith referred to was something pulled straight out of the ass of secessionist political oligarch and rocket scientist, Gary Flomenhoft, who a few years back engineered a seditious plot to supplant the Vermont Supreme Court and judge the work of Vermont's executive and legislative branches using a self-appointed "council" of secesher hacks. One of the hacks, Gaelan Brown, went so far as to suggest capital punishment for errant legislators. Hallsmith herself has had long ties to the moribund Vermont secesher movement. She was a featured speaker at the secesher's 2012 Statehouse Stunt that dazzled tens of Vermonters on a warm, late summer day. (You can read my reports on the 2012 Statehouse Stunt here, here, here, here and here.

At the 8:55 mark of the Flanders Show vid, Hallsmith laid the groundwork for what can only be described as a baldfaced lie when she says,

"I think this year we'll be able to claim some level of victory because it starts to look like the 10% that we talked about, transferring from the Treasurer's account into direct economic lending in Vermont will go through.

They've moved that into a new bill called S. 220 which I believe passed (Ed's Note: No, it hadn't and wouldn't for at least another four weeks, and then in quite a different form than Hallsmith described.) The banking license, however, which of course is part of the tool kit that we (need) to make all of this work is not going to pass this year. But we'll keep working on this next year because I think as the state gets more and more used to this idea of being a bank, they'll start to see the logic and they'll start to see the benefits of it.

Ironically, S. 220 is a bill first proposed by Assistant Minority Leader Sen. Kevin Mullin (Rutland - R), State Chairman of the shadowy ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council as "an act relating to furthering economic development."

What S. 220, passed in the waning hours of this year's legislative session this past weekend, does is formalize through legislation the existing investment in local businesses plan of the Vermont Treasurer's office and provide for discretionary funding for the Governor's office, not unlike many other states programs designed to entice business investment, for both Vermont and elsewhere, far below the 10% boasted about by Hallsmith a month ago. The Vermont state government's capitalistic plan in support of local investment will continue as it has for more than a year and is being expanded to entice out-of-state investment in a way never conceived of by the public banksters. More on S. 220 from VTDigger here.

Vermont public bankster's unregistered lobbyists like Hallsmith and Flomenhoft would be well advised to stop trying to bullshit their way to their goal. This from Seven Days,

"We're very dependent on (lobbyists) for facts. Whereas, in a larger legislature, you'd turn to your staff," says Rep. Chris Pearson (P-Burlington).

But, he cautions, "A lobbyist doesn't get too many chances to get it wrong. If somebody's not trustworthy, you're not going to go back to them."
Seven Days, pg. 33, April 30, 2014

NOTE: An example of the undemocratic nature of Vermont's tiny group of public bank proponents can be found in this hubristic post,

"Erik Esselstyn and Peg Elmer, who were responsible for the Town Meeting votes in East Montpelier and Royalton, made the trip to the Senate Finance Committee Tuesday to represent all the people who voted to tell the legislators to support the legislation for a public bank in Vermont."

I'm not sure how Esselstyn or Elmer can take credit for the votes in some of the smallest communities in Vermont of other Vermonters unless they're making some sort of admission to vote tampering or manipulation or some other kind of voter fraud but I took the time to check both East Montpelier's and Royalton's Town Meeting warrants and neither warrant had the voters consider a question regarding who would represent them before a Senate committee, other than, of course, their own elected representatives in the Senate. Esselstyn's and Elmer's "representation" was of the self-appointed, narcissistic sort.

This isn't the first occasion when Hallsmith's honesty in her presentations has been questioned. When she was fired from her gig as Montpelier's Planning and Community Development Director last fall, published reports mentioned charges of dishonesty:

From Vermont Today: "In his four-page letter to Hallsmith, dated Nov. 6, outlining his reasons for placing her on leave, (Montpelier City Manager Bill) Fraser accused Hallsmith of damaging relationships around City Hall and on the City Council and Planning Commission, unprofessional behavior and insubordination, inappropriate use of city resources, and dishonesty." Source

And

From Seven Days: "City Manager Bill Fraser wrote in a letter to Hallsmith at the time that her dismissal was the result of insubordination, dishonesty and poor relations with colleagues and elected officials." Source

And

From Vermont Public Radio: "“We have a city employee who was terminated by our city manager (Bill Fraser) for a long list of causes relating from inappropriate use of city resources, dishonesty and a few other things,” (Montpelier Mayor John) Hollar says. “It’s matter of public record and if anybody wants to investigate that they can.” Source

It's gotten so that when I read or hear a new misrepresentation of fact from Hallsmith that I'm reminded of the John Lovitz character on SNL, Tommy Flanagan, the Pathological Liar and find myself expecting to hear Hallsmith at the conclusion of her typically dissembling verbal perambulations exclaim, "Yeahhh! That's the ticket!"

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Public Banksters - Part X

Ya know, there're times when I wonder how deep the stoopid goes with secessionists like Gary Flomenhoft and his kinda newish allies in the national public banking movement. Do his public banking colleagues have any idea as to who this asshole really is? And why didn't they do their homework before hooking up with the the faux economist and promoter of the junk, failed and bankrupt economic hokum of Henry George.

Their bill to establish a state run public bank, S. 204, died in the Senate Finance Committee in part because of its reliance on falsehoods presented in a report written by Flomenhoft in his role as a propagandist for the Gund Institute and the Vermont secessionist goal of withdrawing from the economy of "The Empire." Here's how the Vermont public banksters are framing the narrative at Jim Hogue's Vermont Bankster Partnership website of their complete failure to advance a public banking bill to any degree in the Vermont legislature:

March 26 Update

"The Senate Finance Committee did not advance S.204 by the deadline for crossover on March 21. [Ed. Note: Crossover date was March 14 for non- budget items and this bill was not included in the state budget] That means the bill is effectively dead for this session of the legislature. At the one and only hearing on the bill held by the Finance Committee, Chris D’Elia, President of the Vermont Bankers Association, the (Vermont) State Treasurer (Beth Pearce) and the CEO of VEDA, all opponents of a state bank, and Anthony Pollina, who is a supporter of a state bank were asked by the committee to testify. People who had worked on the town meeting campaigns had to practically beg to be given an opportunity to testify."

"The Government Operations Committee (sic) had previously taken testimony on the bill and sent a memo to the Finance Committee urging them to adopt the 10 Percent for Vermont Program and move 10 percent of Vermont’s unrestricted funds to VEDA which would use it to foster economic development and renewable energy initiatives and to create the authority described in S.204 to continue to look into the creation of a state bank." [Ed. Note: Untrue; this is just public bankster fluffing of what the legislative process used means. This meme weaving is so lame that the writer didn't even get the name of the committee - the Vermont Senate Committee on Government Operations - right. This inattention to detail and real facts is also a fundamental weakness and flaw of the "study" manufactured made up by Hogue's colleague, Gary Flomenhoft.]

"In spite of the fact that the bill died in the Finance Committee, support for a state bank has been steadily growing. [Ed. Note: There is no factual basis for such an assertion. There has been no polling done that would scientifically support such a statement. The writer's engaging in wishful thinking, at best, and can provide no real proof for such an opinion.]. We will continue with efforts to increase support to the point where the powers that be can no longer continue to ignore us. [Ed. Note: Again, untrue; "the powers that be," that is, the elected representatives of the people, a station never even remotely achieved by the many secesher aspirants to legislative and statewide offices, did not ignore this citizen request for self-serving legislation. The senators properly received it, properly reviewed the representations made by the proponents, and then properly let such a faulty bill die in committee.] Keep checking for what we are up to [I will.] and ways that you can become involved. We will also continue to send updates containing more reasons why we need a state bank and events concerning our efforts."

Based on the past "successes" of secessionists Hogue, Flomenhoft and the publisher of the Vemont secesher hate blog, Rob Williams in the pursuit of a breakaway republic of Vermont, it's fair to conclude that these hoople heads will deliver in appreciably the same way - much ado about nothing.

One can't help but wonder why the national public banking proponents have thrown in their lot so firmly with such an unsuccessful group like the Vermont seceshers whose track record is so awful. It says much about the thoughtfulness of those running the national group.

Note: in recent months the Vermont seceshers have been scrubbing their websites of some of their more egregious, hateful posts. Of more immediate interest is that the website created by Flomenhoft for his seditious group, the illegally re-constituted Vermont Council of Censors that I reported about nearly three and a half years ago and have also reported on in this "Public Bankster" series has now been taken down. Ever the internet bonehead, Flomenhoft seems unaware that his crappy website and its links are readily available here.

Finally, the perennial "find Rowley" search has been underway again during the past few weeks. Must be that the Public Banksters series has gotten a few knickers into a twist. I hope the searchers won't be too surprised to learn that they too can be spoofed by e-breadcrumbs. Or that at the length truth will out, no matter what.

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For the archive of the Free Vermont Framework listserv, click here.

Public Banksters - Part IX

Remember when Gwen Hallsmith's Vermonters for a New Economy boasted that they'd gotten a question about public banking on Vermont Senator Bill Doyle's annual town meeting day survey?

"The other really good news is that Washington County State Senator Bill Doyle has agreed to include a question asking people if they support a state bank on his annual town meeting questionaire so even those who live in towns that will not be discussing a state bank as part of the town meeting agenda will be able to weigh in on the question."

After town meeting day the public banksters pumped up the volume on their claim of "statewide" support for public banking and put their supporters in the national alternative press into full spin mode as in this piece from Gwen Hallsmith's California based Public Banking Institute where she serves as executive director,

"As John Nichols reported in The Nation on March 9, "In many cases, the votes were overwhelming... Curiously, in light of the overwhelming support for a state bank displayed in the results of the town meetings campaign, the Barre Montpelier Times-Argus called the proposal "politically unpopular" -- and offered no contextual explanation for that description. "

Whoa! The public banksters unregistered lobbyists have variously described the support in Vermont for a state run public bank as "widespread" and "statewide" without ever providing any proof for such statements. It's a lot like that thumb-on-the-scale study provided by the Gund Institute fellow flunky Gary Flomenhoft. His fictions and falsehoods were directly refuted by the Vermont State Treasurer in her report to the Senate Committee on Government Operations of February 5, 2014. And now we have the results of the Sen. Bill Doyle town meeting day survey that earlier Hallsmith and her allies in the Vermont secession movement were so delighted to have been included in. The results for the public banksters were, um, underwhelming. As the Burlington Free Press' political reporter, Terri Hallenbeck, put it, "Vermonters... are not so quick to embrace a state bank."

First I should say that the Doyle survey is by no means scientific since participants are self selected but as Vermonters know, give a sense of where the public feeling is on an issue. Certainly a better sense than the handful of towns where the public banksters hail from and hold some sway with their neighbors.

So, here are the results of the responses to Doyle's very brief question 11 - "Should Vermont create a state bank?":

23% (yes); 38% (no); 39% (not sure)

The results can be parsed a number of ways but the one thing that stands out is that fewer than 1 out of 4 Vermonters (of more than 14,000 survey participants vs the several hundred that may have attended the handpicked meetings carefully vetted beforehand by public banksters and seceshers) express support for a public bank.

Now let the public bankster spinning begin. Since they were the only group incessantly getting their message out, I wonder how that spin might go. Did the banking lobby buttonhole the Vermont public? If so, it must have been one on one since they mounted no publicity campaign. Did the elected guardians of the state's and the public's financial weal somehow hoodwink the survey takers? More likely it was the poorly run campaign based on fictions, falsehoods and a demonstrated inability to play well with others that led to the perception that the real public has for the so-called state run public bank advocates.

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For the archive of the Free Vermont Framework listserv, click here.

Public Banksters - Part VIII

Gwendolyn Hallsmith has the public banking Sadz.

This past week Hallsmith, supposedly the executive director of the California based Public Banking Institute, posted at Rob Williams' hate blog a ludicrous claim that the Vermont secessionist allies at her Vermonters for a New Economy front group had scored a win in the Vermont Senate. You really can't blame her for trying to make lemonade from such a steaming pile of lemons.

First off, I should explain to recent readers of this blog that Rob's hate blog has long been host to some of the most extreme, hateful thinking centering around the Vermont secesher movement. Back when Rob was co-chairman of the Second Vermont Republic he had on his advisory board an assortment of hate group members from the white supremacist League of the South, the racist and anti-immigrant Lega Nord (Northern League of Italy), anti-Semites like Kirkpatrick Sale and Thomas DiLorenzo (who has written neo-Confederate claptrap for a Holocaust denial journal), along with other lowlifes. Rob's hate blog has included the contributions of anti-Semites like Dennis "Hit List" Morrisseau and the castration fixated misandrist Carol Moore, white supremacists like UVM's Robert S. Griffin and a League of the South Board of Directors member (and convicted felon), Franklin Sanders, as well as the anti-Semitic, racist co-founder and baas of the Second Vermont Republic, the still dead Thomas H. Naylor who, along with the Canadian racist and anti-Semite Sebastian Ernst Ronin, was a proponent of a white homeland in northern New England and the Canadian Maritime provinces, and a host of conspiracy theorists including Rob himself - 9/11 Truthers, contrail hoaxers, aliens trading technology with the US military for mineral assets on the darkside of the moon, to, well, you name the nuttiest conspiracy you can think of and it's got an adherent at Rob's hate blog.

Gwen Hallsmith's own particular delusion has to do with her imagining that she can claim a win in the effort to convince the Vermont Senate that her public banking proposal has merit. Here's what she said at the hate blog:

"... it starts to look like we’ll have a modest win on the public banking front as the 10% for Vermont theme struck by Senator Anthony Pollina will likely make it through the legislature, and 10% of the money the state has on deposit will be transferred to the Vermont Economic Development Authority. To win that, it is also likely that VEDA will not get a banking license, but it will still be a step in the direction we all want to go – reclaiming public, democratic control over one of the critical drivers of economic health – the monetary system itself."

Not so fast there, Gwen. That's just the kind of "we-didn't-lose" sort of spin that one expects to hear from a lobbyist, even the unregistered sort like Gwen and her secesher cohort Gary Flomenhoft. Fact is, Vermont has been doing just such a thing for more than a year before the secesher public bankster proposal made it to the legislature but then Gwen and Gary probably already knew that.

In her report the the Vermont Senate Committee on Government Operations of February 5, 2014 the Vermont State Treasurer, Beth Pearce, speaking directly to the 10% local investment plan outlined in the Hallsmith/Flomenhoft plan put forward in the Senate under the bill S. 204 by Senator Anthony Pollina, Pearce advised,

"I want to emphasize that I do support the local investment concept incorporated in S. 204. That said, I differ on significant portions of the proposed mechanics of achieving local investment through the creation of a state bank. The 10% of the state’s cash for local investment in Vermont is something I support..."

"Over the past year we have already made commitments that will get us to $17 million in local investments from our treasury funds (under Act 87). That’s roughly half way to the 10% objective. I am committed to getting us the rest of the way. But as fiduciary I want to address this in a way that is a win-win for Vermont. While I support the concept of 10%, will work to achieve it, and hope to even exceed it, there are portions of the bill that I believe need to be revised to make it a true win for Vermont. Without these changes, I believe there would be great risk—unnecessary risk—for Vermont taxpayers.

Addressing Hallsmith and Flomenhoft's larger plan to morph the Vermont Economic Development Authority into a public bank, Pearce added,

"What I do not recommend is expanding VEDA’s authority to accept deposits from municipalities or other entities, or to engage in banking operations..."

So, Gwen claims credit for that which the Treasurer has been doing for more than a year. Pret-ty chees-ey. And to suggest that the 10% local investment plan came about because,"(t)o win that, it is also likely that VEDA will not get a banking license" is nothing but a straight out lie. There was no quid pro quo and Hallsmith damn well knows that. She not just spinning here, she's bullshitting in a way that shows complete contempt for the ability of average Vermonters to know better.

As for Gwen's reference to Pollina's theme, here's what he's said that's being repeated by public banksters around the country,

"it 'doesn’t make any sense for us to be sending Vermont’s hard-earned tax dollars to some bank on Wall Street which couldn’t care less about Vermont or Vermonters when we could keep that money here in the state of Vermont where we would have control over it and therefore more of it would be invested here in the state.'”

Treasurer Pearce directly refutes Pollina's untruthful assertion by stating in her report to the Senate committee,

"The Treasurer recently sold just under $25M in bonds to Vermonters and approximately 80% of VMBB financings are sold to Vermont investors. Other instrumentalities have significant local investment. We hope to do even more with local investors. Further, when we sell bonds to investors outside of Vermont, capital actually surges into the state and then trickles back out as principal and interest are repaid. Replacing this outside capital with the state’s operating cash would actually represent a loss of state financing resources."

The truth here is that the Hallsmith/Flomenhoft/Pollina public banking proposal scored no "win" or change to existing state investments policy. The proposal died in committee and no action was taken on any part of Senate bill S. 204.

For anyone keeping track at this point, I'd predicted nearly two years ago on April 9, 2012 that Gary Flomenhoft's economic hokum would come to naught when brought again before the Vermont legislature. I'm making the same prediction today should he and Hallsmith take another stab at it with the legislature. And just to make it interesting, I'll predict that Hallsmith will be just as unsucessful in her new scheme to liberate Detroit from the clutches of government and capitalism.

Gwen Hallsmith, buh-bye.

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For the archive of the Free Vermont Framework listserv, click here.

Second Vermont Republic's Racist Ally in Northern Italy Fakes a Secession "Referendum"

For the past two days the European tabloid press and the always reliable (heh) RT website have been a twitter over a stunt orchestrated by the Lega Nord (Northern League of Italy), a racist, homophobic and anti-immigrant group that was long an ally of the essentially defunct (if we're believe the anti-Semitic, segregationist hate blogger, Waco conspiracy theorist nutjob and Wikipedia coatracking specialist at Vermont Commons, Carol Moore). The white separatists at the Lega Nord are promoting the idea of secession for Venice and the surrounding Veneto region from Italy's browner southern part. In a move reminiscent of Vermont secesher leader Gary Flomenhoft's unconstitutional, seditious and illegitimate reconstitution of the long disbanded Vermont Council of Censors, the racist Lega Nord is conducting a "referendum" this week that has no legal authority; more a methodologically challenged poll really. It's online for crissakes! The Italian constitution only permits referendums to abrogate existing laws or to accept/reject constitutional reforms or to adjust provincial/state borders.

As readers of this blog know, the Second Vermont Republic advisory board was riddled with racists, neo-Confederates, anti-Semites, homophobes and immigrant bashers from its inception. I exposed that fact in early 2007. One of those bigoted assholes on the SVR advisory board was the Lega Nord's Marco Bassini. As the SVR began to unravel, the bass of SVR, the still dead Thomas H. Naylor and his Renfield, Rob Williams, sacked the board, although Williams had never seemed to have been able to give two shits about whether his allies were racists.

"Is (Don Livingston) a racist? I don't know. And frankly, it is none of my damn business, at a personal level."

I expect to hear some crowing soon from Vermont seceshers about the Lega Nord fake vote (much like Williams/Flomenhoft/Hallsmith's fake statewide consensus on the public bank proposal of theirs) that inflates the importance of an illegitimate "referendum" a la their touting the results of a non-binding vote by fewer than 5% of this state's town meeting voters. It's all they got so it's what they do.

We Are All Italian Now!

Just to test the value of the results of such a "referendum" I conducted a little test. With the assistance of Google Translate it took about 7 minutes to complete the referendum voter registration process at Plebiscito.eu. Any kind of eight digit identification number will do. Pick any community in the Veneto region for your own and have fun making up your own Italian sounding street (via) name. Come up with an age that you'd like to be for the moment and you're done. I wonder if they'll appreciate the irony of a Giuseppe Garibaldi voting in their referendum. This process hasn't even the integrity of Survey Monkey. I got such a kick out of my sudden enfranchisement in a far off land's secesher referendum that I dumped my cookies and registered a new fake identity to vote again. This show "referendum" should produce the results any secesher would love. Too bad I didn't get to check out this option for the Crimea referendum.

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Public Banksters - Part VI

in the previous five parts of this series there's been a lot on the characters and unregistered lobbyists pushing this proposal and their deep ties to the remnants of the Vermont secession movement.

Today's post will focus on the Vermont State Treasurer's report to the legislature. The links below will take you directly to the League of Women Voters of Vermont website, who sadly seem to have drunk to a little too readily from the vat of Kool-Aid provided by Gwen Hallsmith and Ellen Brown's California based Public Banking Institute. There you can read Vermont State Treasurer Beth Pearce's report and its attachments for yourself. Pearce dismisses out of hand the neo-Georgist Gund Institute (Gary Flomenhoft, really) claim that "concerns about impact on our bond rating (are) unfounded." In essence, with regard to the creation of a state public bank, Treasurer Pearce says like, "Nuh-uh!"

Treasurer Pearce's analysis of the public bank proposal sent to the Senate Committee on Government Operations: http://lwvofvt.org/files/Pearce1.pdf

Also of considerable interest are reports from Vermont's financial advisory firm, Public Resources Advisory Group and the Vermont Municipal Bond Bank. The PRAG "feel('s) that that the establishment of a state bank introduces additional risk to the State, which may in the future negatively affect the State’s credit rating and could increase the State’s cost of borrowing." The VMBB report expresses similar concerns and, like Treasurer Pearce, contests directly the Gund Institute/Flomenhoft assertion that a state bank could be capitalized from unrestricted state assets, saying essentially that such a critter doesn't exist.

Memo from the Public Resources Advisory Group: http://lwvofvt.org/files/Pearce3.pdf

Vermont Municipal Bond Bank report: http://lwvofvt.org/files/Giroux.pdf

Nothing seems to have changed much since the first legislative review of the public banking proposal in 2010 that seceshers threw such a hissy fit over then: http://lwvofvt.org/files/JointFiscal.pdf

One particular concern repeatedly raised by state officials is the potential for political machinations, cronyism and corruption that would be allowed for in the current proposal by the public banksters unregistered lobbyists. It's happened before with other public banks, most of which have failed, and includes the vaunted Bank of North Dakota which has its own very dirty laundry that was not disclosed by the public bank proponents to the legislature or to Vermonters. In short, the Gund Institute/Flomenhoft fictions just ain't gonna cut it with State officials or the state legislature - again.

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For the archive of the Free Vermont Framework listserv, click here.

Public Banksters - Part V

UPDATE 7:03 PM According to the Senate calendar posted a couple of minutes ago, the public banking bill (S. 204) is not scheduled for a Second Reading tomorrow on March 14. That would then seem to mean that the bill is dead unless an extension is granted, which is not very likely to happen. March 14 is the last day that crossover may occur to the House so that makes it doubtful that any bill could be passed in the 2013-2014 biennium. In short, it's probably back to the drawing boards for the seceshers and the unregistered lobbyists in pulling the Vermont economy out of "the Empire." And that'd be two times in recent history that the legislature has properly given the public banking scheme the boot.

Unregistered public bank lobbyist* Gwen Hallsmith, co-founder of Vermonters for a New Economy and the acting executive director of the California based Public Banking Institute, has been shopping around a series of articles on public banking to various online outlets.

One of her more recent forays into meme weaving on the Internets is an opinion piece that she submitted to Al Jezeera America in which she contends that "voters (love) the idea. In 17 towns around the state, a vote to endorse the idea of a public bank passed overwhelmingly last week at the town meetings." What she didn't say was that most of the towns are strongholds of the tiny Vermont secesher community and that they represent as few as 5% of the state's voters or that town meetings themselves normally produce the smallest electoral turnout of Vermont's elections or that the meetings are subject to the hijinks of a small group of activists. She further pumps up the meme with the header, "Vermonters support state public bank, and you should too". Really? And then she adds, "Citizens across state vote to use local dollars to help economy, not Wall Street". Okay, now that's just pure bullshit but, hey, what do they know at Al Jezeera? There was no mention whatsoever of Wall Street in the article presented on the warrant at various town meetings so that's just an outright lie.

Decontextualized fragments of facts is a well worn tactic of the Vermont seceshers and Hallsmith seems to have fallen under the sway of secesher leader and rocket scientist Gary Flomenhoft. The seceshers have a history twisting "facts" of their own creation into a narrative that ultimately is not borne out by electoral results. For years the seceshers claimed that support for secession was growing by leaps and bounds and that as many as 60,000 of the electorate supported secession but when crunch time came more than 99.24% of Vermonters voted for someone other than the secesher gubernatorial candidate, more than 30 times less than their fictional estimate of support. This twisting of the known facts by Hallsmith has the same smell about it.

Significantly, she gave the most personal ink in her piece to longtime secesher propagandist Rob Williams of Waitsfield. That pretty much cements the ties between the unregistered public banking lobbyists and the tiny Vermont secesher community.

ADDED 3/14: In Hallsmith's Al Jazeera opinion piece can be found another example of the contortionistic juxtaposition of facts taken from their proper context to create a self-serving inference that significantly leaves out all of the relevant facts that would lead the Al Jazeera readers to a different conclusion. In a spin taken from the secesher playbook of how to make something out of nothing Hallsmith would have those readers believe that the votes "of a few (less than 5%) seem like a broad consensus" across the state for a proposal that appears to have died in "the statehouse" Senate Finance Committee. Hallsmith notes that the non-binding public banking article considered at Montpelier's town meeting "got more votes than the mayor did in his bid for re-election" without telling the readers that more votes were cast for the mayor than for his opponent who was Hallsmith! Which then begs the question as to why Hallsmith would leave out such a pertinent fact for the readers to know. Hallsmith's campaign grew to be so nasty that she revealed the incomes of the mayor's supporters in a crass appeal to classism. Oh, and Gwen, if you were from Vermont you might have known that there is no governor's mansion in Vermont, unlike what you said. You must have been thinking of California.

* (Note: I've been queried about my contention that Hallsmith, Flomenhoft, et al are, in fact, subject to the requirement to register as lobbyists. The law seems fairly clear that they are required to register due to their having expended in excess of $500 on their effort to influence legislative action on behalf of their public bank proposal. Under Title 2, Chapter 11 of the Vermont Statutes lobbying is defined, in part, as, "(a) to communicate orally or in writing with any legislator or administrative official for the purpose of influencing legislative or administrative action, and (b) (the) solicitation of others to influence legislative or administrative action." Expenditures may be for items like travel, and by their own admission they've done lots of that to persuade voters to contact legislators in support of their public bank proposal, and for things like studies submitted to influence legislators. They've declared on their website that they spent "months" creating their "study," and any study worth reading would certainly have cost more than $500 to fabricate - the law makes no distinction between cash spent or an in kind contribution by one of the lobbyists.

The Vermont Secretary of State's Guide to Vermont’s Lobbying Registration & Disclosure Law recommends:

"Our conservative advice to all is to err on the side of caution, by reporting or registering in any situations where you have any question as to whether your activities would trigger registration and disclosure."

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For the archive of the Free Vermont Framework listserv, click here.

Public Banksters - Part IV

(This post is part of a series intended to shed some needed light on the state public banking plan being lobbied for by unregistered lobbyists from the groups Vermonters for a New Economy, The Public Banking Institute (a California based outfit) and the Gund Institute before the Vermont Senate Finance Committee. The earlier posts have generated some considerable interest but rather than authorizing comments I'm urging readers to contact the Vermont Senate Finance Committee Assistant, Barbara Dall, with their concerns bdall@leg.state.vt.us)

To suggest that there is a "Flomenhoft Mystique" is something of an exaggeration. While the neo-Georgist Gund Institute's Gary Flomenhoft, an "educator" and onetime rocket scientist, has been up to his eyeballs in the decision making processes of the Vermont secession leadership and with the public banking lobbying effort, he's not terribly mysterious or mystical, although for some insane reason VT seceshers seem to hang on his every word.

This post might also have been subtitled the Mad Men edition of the Public Banksters series for a few reasons. Certainly the public relations assault being orchestrated by the unregistered lobbyists for a state run public bank is visible for all to see except, of course, for the willfully blind. (The entire effort is being spearheaded by Flomenhoft's comrade Gwen Hallsmith, co-founder of Vermonters for a New Economy and acting executive director of a California advocacy group called The Public Banking Institute, so why aren't these people complying with Vermont's lobbyist registration law?). But it's the past mad, mad, mad, mad history of one central figure in the campaign for a public bank that is the topic of today's post. This isn't Flomenhoft's first time at the rodeo but he's yet to score a victory in any of his entries. Let me cover some of the highlights:

The Vermont Council of Censors

During a meeting in the spring of 2009 at a Goddard College get together organized by secesher deadenders who were trying to find a way out of the mess that had been created by their national alliances with racists, homophobes and anti-Semites of the extreme radical right, alliances which led to the secesher alienation from all levels of the Vermont polity and critical coverage in the Vermont press, Flomenhoft presented his latest idea (well, not really his original idea but I'll get to that): a reconstitution of the Vermont Council of Censors, a governmental organization that was lawfully disbanded by the legislature in the 1870s.

The Vermont Council of Censors was a group that met at 7 year intervals to report of the constitutionality of the actions of the legislative and executive branches of Vermont government. These duties had come to be covered more regularly and effectively by the judicial branch, thus obviating the need for a redundant organization that met less often. While the original council members were elected to the office, Flomenhoft and his secesher pals proceeded to self-appoint themselves to their conjured Council with the only apparent qualification being that one be a secesher.

The problem with Flomenhoft's idea turned out to be that this was another example of the seceshers ties to the goals and thinking of the radical right. Oh, and that I found out about it.

The first proponent of the creation of a Council of Censors was a Nebraska conservative, Republican party county chairman and Teabagger, Glenn Freeman, who created the National Council of Censors in 2003. Like Freeman, Flomenhoft eschewed any democratic form of creation; he just issued his report/statement/claptrap, like Freeman and created the unelected and supposedly reconstituted Vermont Council of Censors. It's a Teaparty kinda thing so Flomenhoft was attracted to it like a moth to a flame. The national council has done pretty much nothing; after a feisty start that was basically a few meetings and a website, Flomenhoft's Vermont group also came to a screeching halt when I posted about their seditious creation here.

Flomenhoft's Council of Censors proposal and his appointment process of seceshers only reveals his contempt for both judicial review and participatory democracy. Flomenhoft's embrace of a flagrant malapportionment designed to give him and his secesher allies an unwarranted amount of power in state governance pretty much gives you all that you'd need to know about how the seceshers would rule Vermont if they succeeded in their effort, although I'll go into more of his and the other seceshers power delusion in the section following this one.

The Free Vermont Listserv

Later in 2009 Flomenhoft was one of the earliest members to what he and the Vermont seceshers called the Free Vermont Listserv, a place where they believed that could chat in private about the upcoming 2010 election. It didn't turn out to be quite so private.

On the listserv the chat proceeded from Flomenhoft recommending that secesher candidates, like secesher gubernatorial candidate Dennis Steele, keep their policy position vague so that voters wouldn't zero in on items they might take issue with to some really whacked out stuff that anyone in their right mind would take issue with, such as: racism; anti-Semitism; violence laced misogyny; homophobia; appointing themselves minister of this and that; conspiracist claptrap like the notion that the U.S. Is receiving advanced alien technology in exchange for resources being mined on the dark side of the moon; putting members of Vermont's law enforcement community on trial for who knows what; making legislators subject to capital punishment if they don't live up to secesher standards for participation in governing; and on, and on, and on. You can read their chat for yourself at the Free Vermont Listserv provided at the end of this post or this earlier post of mine here.

The Creation of a Provisional Capitol for the Secessionist Second Vermont Republic in Hancock, VT

Perhaps my personal favorite of the lunacy that Flomenhoft has for years been a central figure of is when, hot on the heels of their crushing 2010 defeats for guv, lite-guv and a smattering of legislative seats, he and a small group of confederates met at a ramshackle B&B in Hancock, VT and declared the place to be their "provisional capitol." Dickie Drysdale's Herald of Randolph had a piece on the affair here.

'Nuff said.

Now is often the point when Flomenhoft or one of his pals scream ad hominem! That is, however, a fallacy. What's really happening here is that Flomenhoft is presenting himself as an economic expert without revealing his true agenda - separating from the economic construct of "the Empire" to further the effort for secession - or without revealing that on every occasion that Georgist economic principles have been applied to a community the effort has failed. Flomenhoft's track record for nutty proposals that come to naught speak directly to his credibility as an authority, not unlike the spiteful mayoral candidacy of his colleague and similarly unregistered lobbyist for the lobbying group Vermonters for a New Economy. The character of the proponents of a plan that so radically alters the Vermont economic landscape with the real goal in mind of secession is valid to consider.

This is by no means all of Teh Crheyzy that permeates Flomenhoft's secesher activism but what's significant is that the Vermont Senate Finance Committee has even given this last secesher pipe dream, a plan that the remnants of the Second Vermont Republic have cited on their hate blog as their #1 priority intended to escape economic entanglement with "the Empire," as much attention as they have.

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For the archive of the Free Vermont Framework listserv, click here.

Public Banksters - Part II

A fundamental part of political persuasion is propaganda. Contrasting and comparing is an elemental part of the charade meant to convince others that one "product" is superior to another. Proof is irrelevant. And any well oiled lobbying effort is very aware of this.

Repetition is an essential element of the propagandist, coupled with endorsements from important figures like politicians. Both of these were missing from the first go around by Vermont secessionists in their pursuit of economic separation from "the Empire." The first effort relied considerably on bluster, argument and a large dose of imperiousness. They were on a learning curve. Now they've hit the basics both with endorsements from political mouth breathers and a more than year long propaganda effort that's been supported by a single source of truth that is controlled solely by themselves in the form of the Gund Institute.

The Gund Institute is committed to the fanciful economic theory first espoused by Henry George in the late 19th century known as Georgism. The problem is that where it's been tried Georgism has always failed to deliver on its promise. Marx saw Georgism as a socialism-capitalism hybrid while capitalists have seen Georgism as Stalinism-lite. Both are right and wrong. The Georgists at the Gund Institute have been peddling the failed crap of Georgism for years with little success. The secessionists have been hanging on Gund Fellow Gary Flomenhoft's every utterance for years and have had similarly sad results. I'll have more on Flomenhoft's sorry record in a future post. And Flomenhoft isn't the only Gund honcho with ties to the secessionists; there's also a then Gund boss Robert Costanza, a past editorial contributor to the defunct secesher rag once known as Vermont Commons.

The point here is that with this go round the secessionist leadership that has been primarily in charge of the state bank proposal has adhered to propagandist principles in a more disciplined way. So they present conjecture as fact while ignoring facts that raise serious questions about the efficacy of what they propose. As they work to achieve a bandwagon effect with little public support - the petition of support at longtime secesher Jim Hogue's website has gotten a whooping 19 signators, although that may say more about Hogue's following than it does about support for public banking - they disparage their opponents in a way intend to exclude them from the discussion; you know, state public bank lobbyists good/commercial bank lobbyists evil. One has to wonder why public bank lobbyists have failed to register as such with the Vermont Secretary of State's office as is required by statute.

In the small number of town meetings where the seceshers were able to get their question about a public bank on the warrant (accounting for less than 7% of the state's population - in one town only about 15 voters were needed to make the mark). Expect much to be made of a piddling showing on their question. Many of the small number of towns involved are the hometowns of individual seceshers (Rob Williams - Waitsfield; Jim Hogue - Calais; etc, ad nauseum; funny thing though, the point guy Flomenhoft wasn't able to get the needed signatures in his hometown, Burlington, which says loads about the groundswell of support that is supposedly growing day by day, eh, Gary?) who have a sufficiently number of friends to get to the 5% threshold needed to be considered for the ballot, although in some cases a simple majority of the town's governing board is all that's need.

The recent kerfuffle over the firing of one the public banking lobbyist's, Gwen Hallsmith, from her government job included her accusing her supposed tormentor, Montpelier mayor John Hollar, as being an evil commercial bank lobbyist - horrors! Unfortunately for the public banking lobbyist and former Montpelier community development director, Hallsmith, the Vermont media has extensively reported on her effort to enlist Vermont's governor in a scheme intended to intimidate the commercial bank lobbyist, unsuccessfully I should add. It also raises a valid question about who's really the evil one. You can read two of the better stories by Seven Days VT's Paul Heintz and Vermont Public Radio's Peter Hirschfeld here and here. The whole soap opera aspect to this hasn't been missed by the pols looking at the public bank proposal and as a part of the propaganda effort it can't be doing the public bank lobbying team much good.

So look for more the propagandist's tricks and tools to be put to use by the public banking lobbyists in the coming days - faulty cause and effect based on shaky "facts," repetition, testimonials, name-calling, transference, and emotion laden words - but it's definitely not looking especially good for them. At this point the best outcome for them just might be that they not get a Second Reading by the Senate Finance Committee.

But ya never know how these things are going to turn out. Maybe after all these years of one loss and defeat after another, the secessionists are on the cusp of their first success. I wouldn't bet on it, though.

Next up: The Flomenhoft Mystique.

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Public Banksters - Part I

For those of you who may be unaware (and that would be most of you) the Vermont secessionists are at it again.

They're making their second attempt at getting a public bank established in Vermont. In 2010 the seceshers first started making noise about creating a public bank, eventually bringing a plan to the Vermont Legislature to create their dream bank. At that time they grounded the public bank plan in the debunked economics of Henry George, a late 19th century, charismatic contemporary of Karl Marx. The legislative committee tasked to dealing with these clowns heard them out but left their scheme "on the wall," the legislative equivalent of a graveyard.

This year they're back and they've learned a thing or two about horse trading and are leaving their lightening rod members in the background for the moment. But make no mistake about the fact that the seceshers have made public banking their number one priority since they see it as the first step to disengaging economically from "the Empire."

The Senate bill, S. 204, would create an advisory committee that would forward recommendations for implementation of the public bank plan in 2015. The bill does not address capitalization issues related to creating the bank that estimates for range from thirty to as much as seventy million dollars. I'm sure that the Finance Committee will be able to find that in-between the cushions of the Senate chamber since where they're not likely to find a loose 30-70 mill in the budget. One of the Senate sponsors' longtime hobbyhorse, a Vermont state credit card, is embedded in the next to last page of the bill (that's an example of the horse trading that I mentioned above) and that is likely to prove to be a poison pill for this bill since the bonding necessary to let this bird fly will probably come in at a conservative quarter of a billion dollars - minimum.

This whole public bank shebang has a few ways that it can go but rather than speculate I'm going wait to see what direction the Senate Finance Committee takes. It's safe to say though that this probably hasn't much of a chance of surviving the committee smell test.

UPDATE: 5:28 PM the Senate has just published its calendar for tomorrow, February 28, and no Second Reading of the bill is scheduled - tick, tock.

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Vermont Secessionist Rocket Scientist and Constitutional Blowhard to be an Early Presenter at...

... the third Vermont Secesher Statehouse Stunt to be held in Montpelier on Friday that they're calling their Vermont Independence Party.

There comes a point where one has to ask, how long will these idiots keep banging their heads into the wall of a society that finds them and their screwy worldview to be unsuitable, unpalatable and ultimately unsustainable.

Being one of those at the tip of the spear of the Vermont secesher braintrust, Gary Flomenhoft intends to make another boneheaded recommendation about the Vermont economy.

In 2009, Flomenhoft cooked up a scheme with ten other seceshers to set the elected Vermont legislature and other statewide elected officials straight. You see, Flomenhoft and his crew thought that the elected officials needed a report detailing their unconstitutional behavior over the last 140 plus years. So how better for Flomenhoft and his merry band of governmental usurpers to do so than by illegally convening a legally disbanded governmental agency, the Vermont Council of Censors. The Council of Censors' duties are now primarily performed by the Vermont Supreme Court but the Flomenhoft gang figured fuck'em. They said they'd be issuing their "report" on the legislature sometime around the end of 2010. Like so much of what the seceshers have promised over the years we're still waiting. The seceshers chatted repeatedly about what they were going to do as the Vermont Council of Censors at their super-secret listserv - a searchable mirror of which can be found here.

Another scheme that Flomenhoft has come up with, along with some dipshit at the "Gund Institute" named Robert Costanza who moonlights in some fashion as a kind of Vermont Commons editorial board honcho, is more confiscatory economic grab bagging. Normally when these clowns sit around dreaming up the junk they think will con others into joining them, they invariably call their tiny group a "think tank" or, as in this case, an "institute." This "institute" came up with a plan best described as Stalinism light. Along with other seceshers who propose asset and income caps, the Gund guys want to lay claim to Vermonters private property, land, minerals, woodlots and natural resources, as well as the national airwaves (radio, TV and wireless) and the Internet. Now where have we heard this bullshit before? Well, at earlier secesher konfabs for starters and from economist contemporaries of Karl Marx like Henry George. The first attempt to implement George's economic crackpottery occured in the first decade of the 20th century in Great Britain and the result was an economic crisis - Georgism now, with a few minor limited exceptions like a township in Alabama that hasn't hit the cellar yet, is dead.

And, as if Flomenhoft isn't idiot enough on his own, he's advocated that others commit felonies by hacking websites like this and two others that I know of. At the moment, one European hacker/supporter of Vermont secession is paying repeated visits to this blog, but more on this next week after the "party" is over.

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One Thing You Can Count On Is That Vermont Secession Losers Will Sidle Up To Their Anti-Semitic Allies Trough To Get Their Own Fill Of The Swill

Gary Flomenhoft, a purveyor of pissant Vermont constitutional interpretation and apologist for racialistic excuses from Vermont secessionist boneheads like Rob Williams continues to make an idiot of himself.

For those who may not have heard, Flomenhoft was the secesher wizard who came up with the idea of "reconstituting" a previously (like a hundred and fifty or so years ago) elected agency by appointing secesher nut bars like Robert Wagner, Dennis Morrisseau and (insert favorite diety here) knows whatever asshole to his magical Council of Censors. These guys are the secesher mind trust that are going to bring up on charges every friggin' member of the Senate or Legislature that don't see things through their bizzaro world lens. One of these secesher "Internet cowboys" even went so far as to argue for making a capital crime (as in death sentence) for what was formerly an ethical violation. I've had the misfortune to have read page after page of Team Flomenhoft's giddy anticipation of what real power would permit them to do to their fellow Vermonters here.

Normally I'd provide numerous links to revelations of these past exploits of the secession Musketeers but it's all growing so incredibly tiresome.

Flomenhoft, a real-life rocket scientist, is also a peddler of junk economics that have zero chance of making it with the legislators, Vermont businesses or Vermonters in general. Flomenhoft and his pal, the not-ever-going-to-be "Senator" Robert Wagner, intend to propose radical new taxes on Vermonters that'll cripple families and businesses based on a model once implemented in the early 20th century by Britain with disastrous results that led to its abandonment in a very few years, and which was adopted as "collectivisation" under the virulently anti-Semitic Joseph Stalin and which eventually cost millions of Soviet lives.

So why would it come as little surprise that Flomenhoft would recently post at Williams' secesher blog haven this dumb analysis of the world at war. You see, in Flomenhoft's concise worldview, all things bad are American in origin. And if it takes going to a world-class anti-Semite like Paul Craig Roberts to scoop up your garbage, well, hell why not? Paul Craig Roberts' website is where the non-existent Second Vermont Repubic's "VERY (ALL CAPS his) Foreign Minister" Dennis Morrisseau proposed his hit list for Jews he'd like to be rid of here. You can learn more about Flomenhoft's bottom feeding source here.

Now I could probably make some snarky comment about when will Flomenhoft, Williams, (who has his own problems with intemperate remarks regarding his issues with those who rightly object to anti-Semitism and thinly argued racist apologia) their neo-Confederate and white supremacist, League of the South ally, Thomas J. DiLorenzo, and the rest of the clowns who recently collaborated on a dopey secessionist essay montage (see this paragraph's link) be coming out with their analysis on Jewish domination of the U.S. government, world banking, the Intertubes and the greeting card industry but that'd be too easy.

Let's just say that Flomenhoft's "commentary" provides ample proof that these idiots are going nowhere... ever.

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Eye On "The 30" - Their Senate Campaigns Are To Be Buttressed With Sappy Glurges

Oy!!

After running two of the most lackluster, over-the-line stoopid campaigns for the Vermont Senate in 2010, the neo-Confederacy of Dunces comprised of "Senator" Robert Wagner (Addison-I) and the Second Vermont Republic's "Very Foreign Minister", Dennis Morriseau (Rutland-I), apparently think that a mawkish strategy based on sheer bullshit about the past is now the way to go.

Their distorted view of the 1960s is so appealing to these two secesher Mad Men that Denny passed along an urban legend, commonly called a "glurge," that's been getting chain emailed everywhere during the past six months. It's about recycling and such, and is called "The Green Thing." The "Senator" asked for the author of the original email chain letter to contact him so he could provide attribution for the piece. This one is so new that Snopes.com hasn't written about it yet but already, as the "Senator" could have easily found for himself, you get 230,000 hits for "The Green Thing."

Email chain letters like "The Green Thing" often have a sappy ring of truth to them that ignores the reality of such times. The "Senator" goes so far as to suggest that court ordered reapportionment in the 1960s, designed to eliminate disproportionate control of the legislature by small towns, was a bad thing and mistakenly suggests that it was the legislature that "usurp(ed) the authority of Town Meeting." No, "Senator." It was as a result of a "one person, one vote" ruling and order from the federal court in Buckley v. Hoff (1964) that the stranglehold of small towns like Ripton, VT on the legislature was eliminated.

Some of the other cool things that the "Senator" and Denny have forgotten or misremembered about the 1960s that don't get a mention in "The Green Thing" are: both Kennedys, Malcom X and the King assassinations; anti-miscegenation laws to protect against race mixing, something that at least one major SVR financial supporter, James Duncan, has a problem with even today; Jim Crow Laws; riots everywhere, from Detroit to Stonewall; the treatment of women (more on that below); ramping up the Vietnam War; raw sewage being piped directly from individual homes and businesses into Vermont's streams and rivers, as well as untreated waste and industrial chemicals, so much so that in many areas the streams and rivers had ecological "dead zones"; lesbians and gays being legally proscribed and medically defined as mentally ill; job and housing discrimination was legal; poll taxes; "Hey Jude"; the Voting Rights Act (the "debt crisis" political fight of its day); and, smokers were everywhere. Good times, eh guys?

You can find handy tips about how to spot an urban legend here.

Regarding women, it appears that Denny's views about them haven't evolved much since the 1960s. On February 16 of 2010, as he became aware that Anne Galloway at VTDigger was not going to agree to publish promotional material on behalf of the views of the "Very Foreign Minister" of the Second Vermont Republic, he wrote in that ALL CAPS way of his of her publication:

"WITH OUT A DOUBT, Digger is excrescence of CIA.......
Still....we gotta use the MAN'S media to extent that we can.
While biulding(sic) our own internal and external communications..."

On May 27, Denny wrote in response to a sexist nickname used by the "Senator" who had referred to Galloway as "VT GoldDigger":

"The Lady is CIA, and if she wants to sue me for the remark, she is welcome to."
DM/VFM (Very Foreign Minister)

On May 30, VTCommons publisher/editor Rob Williams chimed in about Galloway:

"CIA spook that she is..."

In a later exchange on June 1, between the "Senator" (who complained that his pithy comments were being deleted from VTDigger) and VTCommons publisher Rob Williams, Williams wrote something that explains the lack of any objective quality at his propaganda rag:

"Most reporters regurgitate press release as "fact," and call it objective journalism, friends."
"When they dare to have an opinion, they put it on the OP/ED pages."
"It ain't right, and we need to challenge it (as everything else...)"

Following in his "she's-a-CIA-operative" theme, Morrisseau responded about Anne Galloway:

"a sycophant or sucking for a job......or earning her little stipend now......What's the difference?"
"Spooks come in many varieties as do the rest of us.

But this tone had been set back on February 16 when Morrisseau wrote of how to handle VT Digger publisher, Anne Galloway:

"We will seduce her."

To which James Duncan, the racist and homophobic contributor to Dennis Steele's campaign responded:

"You are such a womanizer Denni."

But the real Morrisseau, vis-à-vis how he today sees a professional journalist who happens to be a woman, shines through in this comment to the rest of what Dixie singing Thomas Naylor likes to call his "Internet cowboys":

"Because I savaged her in our first few exchanges."
"Now I am making nice. And she likes that better. So she is liking me better......"
"Before I punched her, she did not know me or care a fig........"
"Now she sees I can laugh, I am playful....possibly intelligent...and I differ with her........"
"She begins to be intrigued."
"We have to be lovers to these sorts...... I know that is a little crass....but it's DO OR DIE time."

And so on May 28, under the subject line, "I've had enough of Galloway. VT GoldDigger" Morrisseau wrote:

"No reason for her to breathe OR DO WHAT SHE DOES.....unless she is a SPOOK."
"NOBOCY(sic) is that venal from stupidity."

To date, not one of Naylor's "Internet cowboys" who were active recipients on the secesher listserv has made any public statement condemning Morrisseau's outrageous, violence laced, sexist diatribes. Not the publisher of VTCommons, Rob Williams; nor Washington Senate candidate Gaelan Brown; nor educator & rocket scientist Gary Flomenhoft; nor the very strange Franklin County perennial loser, Peter Moss; nor homophobe and racist bigot James Duncan; nor the failed lite guv candidate, and now the present day candidate for a Chittenden County Senate seat, Peter Garritano; nor, of course, Morrisseau's self-described "friend," Addison County's Senate wannabe, "Senator" Robert Wagner.

Unless the secesher boys club take steps to address their indisputable sexism problem, they are destined for another round of exceptionally failed electoral campaigns. No doubt that VTCommons' anti-Semitic blogger and sometimes ardent feminist when it suits her agenda, Carol Moore, will be taking the boys club to task over their vile, long-running wallow in misogyny - yeah, right.

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