Historic Vermont Secession Meeting Held


Greg Szymanski

The members of a peaceful freedom-fighting group want no part of neo-cons
running the imperialistic U.S. government. Plan to secede from the U.S.
gaining momentum in the fiercely independent Green Mountain state.

The neo-con band of criminals running Washington, trampling on civil rights
at home and invading countries at will overseas, has led a large group of
strong-minded Vermont freedom-fighters with no choice but to secede from the
United States.

And last Friday at the state capital building in Montpelier, a historic
independence convention was held, the first of its kind in the United States
since May 20, 1861, when South Carolina decided to leave the Union.

Hoipolloi Cassidy writes:

"Making France and Influencing Media"

Hoipolloi Cassidy

I)
My own political Primal Scene: I'm, maybe nine years old, in Paris in the 'fifties, and my mother's hurrying me home because the police have cordoned off the street and started picking up all dark-skinned males. "Algerians," she says, as if that explained anything. Now, fifty years later, there are few Algerians living in the gentrified center of Paris. Some things have changed, some haven't, and there's a lot of explaining left to do.

For one thing, French distrust of North Africans has a long, bitter history, which is also a history of slow improvements. A few years back I wandered into a café in a lower-middle class area of Paris with a friend. My friend ordered at the counter but I didn't want anything. "Ah, said the owner with a smile, Monsieur is observing Ramadan!" This kind of comment was unthinkable fifty years ago.

Yet riots like those going on right now have been going on for years, on and off, in towns and suburbs far outside of Paris, led by disaffected children of immigrants, black, Muslim or both, and for the usual reasons: high unemployment, nothing to do, resentment of racism. The difference this time is that the trashing and burning and assaults that have broken out over the past ten days in the northern suburbs of Paris are too close to ignore. What's new is a desperate desire to make sense of these events. You might even say, in the grand intellectual tradition of France, that they exist above all in their own interpretation.

Personal Debts and US Capitalism

Rick Wolff, Monthly Review

There is no precedent in US — or any other — history for the level of personal debt now carried by the American people. Consider the raw numbers. In 1974, Federal Reserve data show that US mortgage plus other consumer debt totaled $627 billion. By 1994, the total debt had risen to $4,206 billion, and by 2004, it reached $9,709 billion. For the second quarter of 2005, the Fed announced that the nation's debt service ratio (debt payments as a percentage of after-tax income) was 13.6%, the highest since the Fed began recording this statistic in 1980. Past borrowing now costs Americans so much in debt service that more borrowing is required to maintain, let alone expand consumption.

These facts raise two questions: what caused this mountain of debt to arise and what are its consequences? Answering these questions is an urgent matter since, as has been known for centuries, the risks of high debt include economic collapse.