Xtra News Community 2
March 29, 2024, 12:50:58 pm
Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
News: Welcome to Xtra News Community 2 — please also join our XNC2-BACKUP-GROUP.
 
  Home Help Arcade Gallery Links BITEBACK! XNC2-BACKUP-GROUP Staff List Login Register  

“Civilised” California versus the “barbaric” Trump regime…

Pages: [1] 2   Go Down
  Print  
Author Topic: “Civilised” California versus the “barbaric” Trump regime…  (Read 1695 times)
0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.
Kiwithrottlejockey
Admin Staff
XNC2 GOD
*
Posts: 32232


Having fun in the hills!


« on: December 08, 2016, 09:46:06 am »


from the Los Angeles Times....

California has good reasons to secede, but a noble reason to stay

By DAVID HORSEY | 5:00AM PST - Wednesday, December 07, 2016



AS EARLY AS 1803, Federalists in the New England states were talking seriously about breaking off from the fledgling United States. They were alarmed by what they characterized as the “oppression and barbarity” of the federal government under the leadership of President Thomas Jefferson.

On December 20th, 1860, shortly after the election of Abraham Lincoln, South Carolina became the first state to go beyond talk and actually secede from the Union. Within months, 10 other slave-holding Southern states followed South Carolina’s example. Secession did not turn out so well for the South and no one has made a serious effort to disunite the states since.

That does not mean people in certain states do not still mull over the idea of secession when the powers-that-be in Washington are not to their liking. Early on in Barack Obama's presidency, Texas Governor Rick Perry half-jokingly talked about taking the independence road, while other Obama-hating Texans much more seriously pushed for secession.

Now, with the prospect of Donald Trump's reign at hand, the secessionist talk has moved to the Left Coast. A group of activists has begun gathering voter signatures to put a measure on the 2018 state ballot that would ask, “Should California become a free, sovereign, and independent country?”

One of the groups backing the proposal is the newly formed California National Party. In a letter to the editor of the Los Angeles Times, Kerry Cox, a party member, said his organization “is dedicated to liberating California from a union that is no longer reflective of our values, and from two political parties that either treat us with scorn and ridicule, or use us as a cash cow to finance elections.”

Cox said California's share of U.S. defense expenditures is greater than the entire defense budget of Russia. “We're already a country,” he said. “It's time to make it official.”

Not many people think California's secessionists have the slightest chance of success. Still, there are plenty of folks in the Golden State who dearly wish they could be liberated from the coming Trump regime. In the November 8th election, Californians voted heavily in favor of Hillary Clinton, while also passing measures to legalize the recreational use of marijuana, bolster already tough gun laws and extend taxes on the wealthy. Each of those choices put the state at odds with Trump and with members of the Cabinet he is assembling.

California's leadership on climate change, support of environmental regulations and opposition to new offshore oil drilling schemes is very likely to run afoul of the policies of the new administration and the Republican-controlled Congress. And California cities and universities are already going on record to say they will fight any Trump-led scheme to round up and deport undocumented immigrants, especially the thousands who are students in the state's colleges.

Like the revolutionaries of 1776, Californians could base their case for independence on a complaint of “taxation without representation.” The state sends far more tax money to Washington than it gets back. At the same time, the votes of its 39 million people are dramatically under-represented in the Senate and the electoral college due to the Constitution's built-in bias that favors sparsely populated Trump-loving states such as Wyoming, Alaska and the Dakotas.

As the sixth-largest economy in the world, a place where 2 million new jobs have been created in the last five years, California could do just fine on its own and might find people in the like-minded blue states further up the coast — Oregon and Washington — clamoring to join a progressive California confederacy. However, that truly is an ecotopian pipe dream (despite the fact that the stuff to induce pipe dreams is now legal in these parts).

What is much more likely to happen is that the West Coast will provide a counterweight to any Trump administration over-reach and extremism. The best-case scenario: California will not split the country, it will save the country.


http://www.latimes.com/opinion/topoftheticket/la-na-tt-california-secede-20161206-story.html
Report Spam   Logged

If you aren't living life on the edge, you're taking up too much space! 

Pages: [1] 2   Go Up
  Print  
 
Jump to:  

Powered by EzPortal
Open XNC2 Smileys
Bookmark this site! | Upgrade This Forum
SMF For Free - Create your own Forum


Powered by SMF | SMF © 2016, Simple Machines
Privacy Policy
Page created in 0.027 seconds with 15 queries.