Secession!

[Willie Escalade]

Okay...all fifty states have a petition online to break away from the USA. I want to know how folks - including those on the other side of the Atlantic - feel about this. What's your reaction?

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics...,4408092.story

[MdR Dave]

Take all the signers and move them to Alabama and Mississippi. Tear up all roads, railways, airports and public utilities. Cut them off from all communications- mail, TV and Internet (FCC, thank you)- then check in with those redneck, white bread, chickenshit motherfuckers in a year it two.

[Prospero]

It is ludicrous.

Could that really happen? Not according to one of THE most right wing of your Supreme Court judges, Antonin Scalia in a letter he wrote in 2006. I wonder if he'll mintain that position were it to come to the court?

Oh and a picture from Texas... deep thinkers involved in a bid to secede.

[martin48]

Okay...all fifty states have a petition online to break away from the USA. I want to know how folks - including those on the other side of the Atlantic - feel about this. What's your reaction?

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics...,4408092.story

We have, in little old Britain, so much enjoyed our time as a member of the European Union and forever a large section of our society wants to leave that we would have every sympathy with the US breaking up. Anyway Scotland is thinking about buggering off. If you do split up - that's the end of the US as a world power - China's time is coming!

[danthepoetman]

If we loosely follow the numbers in the article, about 300 000 peoples have signed the petition. It would mean that close to 1 moron out of 1000 persons have signed it so far, which is pretty much when you stop to think about it. I'd be curious to see some polls on the question. These people are nuts! completely nuts! This political crazyness has gone quite far; I wander if it's not getting out of hand. How can anyone govern such a mess. The conservative propaganda is to blame in my opinion; people who proclaim themselves patriots are probably in this occurence, those who are making this country more and more difficult to govern and give it more and more trouble getting anywhere... To me, this is no joke; it's seriously fuc**d.

[trish]

I'd be curious to see some polls on the question. These people are nuts! completely nuts! This political crazyness has gone quite far;

These people so fucking racist they're blind. They're only willing to live in a democratic republic provided everything goes their way. If someone takes office they don't like they immediately declare that their main mission is to get him out of office, deny his legitimacy and stonewall his agenda. Now they want to secede!

I'm a U.S. citizen as are both my parents. My father's ancestors were southern plantation slaves, though he has Irish, Scotch and German blood as well as African. My mother's mother came from Korea and proudly became a naturalized U.S. citizen. So I look at all these asswipes who apparently don't give a shit about representative democracy and who whine that they want to secede and it just reminds me of all those times past when these same intolerant ignoramuses would look at me ask, "Why don't you back to where you came from?"

But you have to remember, these complainers are hurting bad. They've been forced to step out of the tea-bagger echo chamber and they're blinded by the truth of their situation. The world is not what they thought it was. They have a lot of readjusting to do. Give 'em a little time. Not far in the future I can see one of them holding a sign that reads, "KEEP YOUR GOVERNMENT HANDS OFF MY OBAMACARE!!"

[Stavros]

My gut reaction is simple -they are sore losers.

Looked at more closely, there are cases where secession has worked, in recent times the break-up of Czechoslovakia initially left the Czech Republic in a better economic position than Slovakia, where the economy has improved in recent years; it was also an amicable split, striclty speaking probably not secession. The creation of the Southern Sudan has been less fortunate and fractious relations with Sudan over resources will rumble on for years. The attempted secessions of mineral-rich Katanga Province in Zaire in the 1970s and 1980s were the occasion for the grimly relentless bloodletting that has blighted that country, but was never as bad as the impact of the secession of 'Biafra' from Nigeria in 1967 which caused widespread devastation for the Ibo and has been the subject of various novels and books, most recently by Chinua Achebe in There Was A Country (2012).

Scotland will vote in a referendum on independence from the United Kingdom in the autumn of 2014, but it is not not clear what this will mean in practice on a range of isssus, such as sovereignty over the oil and gas fields that exist in what may become 'Scottish waters' because approximately 49% of the oil and gas reserves of the North Sea are owned by independent companies that signed licences with the British Government. Scotland would not be able to nationalise the whole of the petroleum industry without first creating its own oil company, and it might spend years in the courts being sued for damages by the oil companies. It also seems odd that Scotland would want to take control of a declining resource, for while there are still substantial reserves of oil and gas, the peak has been passed, and in addition to managing a declining resource Scotland would have the burden of decommissiong numerous oil and gas platforms when the times comes. And this is just one resource. The implications for the tax revenue of the British government is obscure but so too is the tax burden for Scotland where proportionately more families claim welfare benefits than anywhere else in the UK; this means that an independent Scotland even if it managed to gain control of North Sea oil and gas and its profits, would be spending most of it on welfare rather than on economic development.

On the other hand Scotland has its own currency, its own legal and education systems, and its own Parliament. Like the states of the Union, where 'states rights' grants autonomy on a range of issues such as state versions of the law, you could argue that individual States have in place the mechanism for independence, assuming for example that they eschew the protection of the US military and establish their own 'national guard' and so on. Or, if they did wish to remain part of the US military defence shield, might they be asked to pay extra for it?

And so on; the more you look into it, the more unanswered quesions arise, but as I say, it really is just a small group of sore losers who want the benefits of being American without being asked to pay their fair share of it.

But what does California Republic mean on that state's flag; one Californian once joked to me we will break away from the union one day...it was a joke, and he wasn't referring to an earthquake along the San Andreas fault turning the south west into an island...

[Prospero]

Good posts by Tricia and Stavros.
Racists AND poor losers.
It is depressing there are so many in the US.

[Jericho]

Untied States of America

[trish]

Next time we're using Velcro®