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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Another Reputedly Early Vermont Secession Proponent Gets Some Distance Between Himself and the Secesher Wingnuts

Years ago Vermont writer Bill Mares wrote a book with University of Vermont professor Frank M. Bryan titled "OUT! The Vermont secession Book" that flatlanders (only) scooped up

while they were bagging up leaves to take home to prove that they'd visited Vermont during foliage or, as those same flatlanders often as not called it, "foilage" season.

Since the "small community" (their words, not mine) of Second Vermont Republic (SVR) secessionist droids appeared on the scene in 2003, Mares has kept his distance.  Bryan not so much.

Early on, Bryan served on the SVR advisory board for years despite it being well known that his fellow board members were members of white supremacist groups both here and abroad.  When Bryan finally quit the group he said that he only took so long because he didn't want to look like he was being forced out because of charges of racism against SVR. I wrote at length on Bryan's departure, no, getting his ass kicked out by that Magnolia Vermonter, Thomas Naylor, who said that Bryan wasn't a sufficiently doodah secessionist here.

You'd think a professor would have had more balls than to hang out with the Dixie singin' Thomas Naylor crowd long after it became well known that Naylor was routinely rubbing shoulders with some of the most despicable, racist Lost Cause characters that you couldn't possibly make up on your own.

Any who, Mares indirectly sinks the shaft into Vermont seceshers with a commentary that aired on VPR today.  You can listen to it here or read it below.

Mares: Secession Revisited
Vermont Public Radio
Wednesday, 11/28/12 5:55pm

By Bill Mares

"..(Host) With post-election petitions to secede flowing into the White House, writer, former state legislator and commentator Bill Mares reflects on real and fanciful moves to leave the Union."
"..(Mares) Since President Obama's re-election, numerous petitions to secede from the union have arrived at the White House. They're made up of approximately 600,000 signatures from all 50 states - or roughly 2 tenths of one percent of all Americans. The hotbed of this modern-day secession movement is Texas , whose governor Rick Perry referred to it publicly during his brief run for the presidency. The Texas secede web site insists that, "...it is practically feasible for Texas to withdraw from the union, and to do so would protect it's citizens' standard of living and re-secure their rights and liberties..."

"Secession is a topic I've thought about before. 25 years ago, UVM prof essor Frank Bryan and I wrote a book that speculated about how Vermont might secede from the union. We titled it, "OUT, The Vermont Secession Book" with the sub-title, "We won't make that mistake again." We invented a covenant supposedly signed by Ethan Allen and George Washington giving Vermont the right to secede whenever we became sufficiently angered by federal actions. We imagined a currency backed by pure maple syrup which was stored in the Granite quarries of Barrie . We proposed to sell products like fresh air, Bag-Balm, dried cow manure and hand-size plots of land (100 square inches) so that millions could own "a piece of Vermont." And so on . We me ant the book to be a satirical spoof. But these New Secessionists - like the "birther movement" to cast doubt on Obama's citizenship - are no joke."

"I grew up in Texas so I know from experience how some residents of the Lone Star State view the world . My elementary school textbook was titled "The true history of the war between the states, from a southerners' point of view." We were taught that in 1845, the United States joined Texas in a new Union. And a popular song of the era was "Save that confederate money boys, The South will rise again."

"But the urge to secede isn't limited to either the South or the Conservative Right. Before the Election six different friends sent me an open internet letter proposing that the Blue states should secede if Romney won - because, among other things, they claimed that:
62% of those in the Red states believe life is sacred unless we're discussing the death penalty or gun laws, 44% say that evolution is only a theory, 53% that Saddam was involved in 9/11 , and 38% that Jonah was actually swallowed by a whale.
Fortunately, in most of the country cooler heads have prevailed. At Mississippi State University campus newspaper student editors warned against this "internet sensation" this way:

"To those who signed petitions to secede from the union, think long and hard about what that signature implies. Abraham Lincoln once said, ‘A house divided against itself cannot stand.'"

"Finally, the secessionist fire no longer burns in Rick Perry's belly. According to his press secretary, "the Governor believes in the greatness of our Union and nothing should be done to change it."

Move over Bernie Sanders, Bill McKibben and virtually every other Vermonter who hasn't boarded the Naylor crazy train. It looks like Mares just got himself a prime seat on the enormously long Naylor shitlist.

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

SVR's Dennis Steele's Campaign Is Clearly in Nowhereland in New Poll

Updated At Bottom

Last month the first poll that gave the public a sense of the state of the post primary gubernatorial race told us that things aren't quite as Thomas Naylor, baas of the Second Vermont Republic would have us believe.

For years Naylor has been touting his commissioned polls from UVM's Center for Rural Studies that used a highly suspect methodology to get results that he's claimed show that 8% (2006), then 13% (2007) and then later 11.5% (2008) of Vermonters eligible to vote would support Vermont secession. (see section on Naylor's polls in the column to the right → ) Has he a newer poll for 2009 or 2010 that shows a continuance of that downward drift? He's not saying.

Factoring in the margin for error, Naylor's "polls" that he's released would seem to indicate that somewhere between 10-15% of Vermont's eligible voters at some time supported secession, and whose actual numbers he at various times has "extrapolated" to be 50,000 to 60,000 of Vermont's voters. His claims to that level of support for his daffy ideas about Vermont secession and his ongoing war of words against an "Israeli Mafia" are truly unsupportable.

In the meantime, according to one poll taken a month ago,

"The latest Rasmussen Reports statewide telephone survey shows Shumlin, the state Senate president pro tempore, picking up 49% of the vote, while Dubie draws support from 46%. Two percent (2%) prefer some other candidate, and three percent (3%) are undecided."

That's a far cry from Naylor's projections but in this poll there was no specific mention of Connecticut native Dennis Steele.

So far, every previous electoral attempt in Vermont by the seceshers, real or imagined, has failed miserably. Despite that well known fact, Steele's been making absurd claims of winning in debates where he's repeatedly duck important questions.

Last November, according to a post at the Free Vermont listserv by secesher Gaelan Brown, Dennis Steele said that he's been rejected by his community because of his talk of secession:

"... (I)n Kirby... you've said repeatedly that you've lost a lot of credibility ("shunned" is the word you've used, I believe) in your town as a result of your public secession-talk."

Now comes the VPR Vermont Poll with some even worse news for the secessionistas.

"The poll also finds that the five other candidates in the race for governor got about one percent support each."
- VPR

A whooping 1%!! of support, give or take (but my money's on take). Odum predicted the five way split last night. It looks like Steele's Kirby neighbors have got his number, too. For those who follow gubernatorial races here in Vermont, it's well known that even a stray cat that gathers the five hundred signatures required to get on the ballot can get one percent. 20 years ago one candidate in a gubernatorial debate was televised doing beadwork while reportedly off his meds, and he got 1½%!

We'll get solid poll results come this November 2.

Check back here next week for even more bad news about the SVR and VTCommons seceshers.



Update 1:34 PM: Apparently still reeling from poll results released 6 hours ago, the self-styled media expert, propaganda minister for the Free Vermont crowd and honcho-in-chief for "Vermont Commons", Rob "I Can't Believe This Is Happening Again" Williams, churns a week old debate post (you remember, the one Dennis Steele claims that he won) with a dead video link in lieu of anything on his candidates (Lt Guv wannabe Garritano bit the bag, too) abysmal showing in the VPR Vermont Poll hours before his post.

Here's an idea for Rob-o. He can hype the results as showing that his boys are closing in. Remember, Rob-o, based on their performance thus far, the only way is up!

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