California voters in two northern rural counties split the difference Tuesday on 51st state ballot measures aimed at carving out a new state called Jefferson.
Measure A lost by 41 to 59 percent in Del Norte County, while Tehama County voters approved Measure A by 56 to 44 percent, according to figures from the county clerks.
… In Del Norte County, a union-backed group called Keep It California waged a battle against the measure, arguing that it would further impoverish the county by removing state funding for services like schools. The school board had also opposed the proposal.
Supposedly the AFL-CIO and SEIU-backed opposition spent more than 40k opposing the measure. More county boards are taking it up next week, so stay tuned. Mark Baird fires back at local officials regarding the unsuccessful Del Norte county vote:
We are not finished by a long shot. It took Maine three tries to break away from Massachusetts. The apathy from the Massachusetts legislature toward a distant corner of the state is a reflection of what is going on here.
Liars, lie. It is what they do. It is in David Finnigan’s nature to be a liar. He has violated county administrative procedures by denying the other Supervisors the opportunity to speak and to vote. He has denied the public their First Amendment rights in a public meeting. He has lied to his constituents regarding attempts to widen the highway, when he is a member of the group which wants to keep a dangerous road. Martha McClure is cut from the same cloth.
Isn’t Hendricks the guy responsible for the alleged missing funds from the waste management district?
Here’s Keli’i Akina’s piece on why the Obama administration’s proposal for what amounts to tribal recognition for Native Hawaiians is unconstitutional and doesn’t address the aspirations of independence advocates.
Several more Northern California counties plan secession votes:
Voters in Del Norte and Tehama, with a combined population of about 91,000, will decide June 3 on an advisory measure that asks each county’s board of supervisors to join a wider effort to form a 51st state named Jefferson.
Elected officials in Glenn, Modoc, Siskiyou and Yuba counties already voted to join the movement. Supervisors in Butte County will vote June 10, while local bodies in other northern counties are awaiting the June 3 ballot results before deciding what to do.
A similar but unrelated question on the primary ballot in Siskiyou County asks voters to rename that county the Republic of Jefferson.
“We have 11 counties up here that share one state senator,” compared to 20 for the greater Los Angeles area and 10 for the San Francisco Bay Area, said Aaron Funk of Crescent City, a coastal town in Del Norte County near the Oregon border. “Essentially, we have no representation whatsoever.”
Frank Bryan, the legendary historian of Vermont town meeting politics, has a new essay in Green Mountain Noise, the Second Vermont Republic’s magazine, about decentralism and human-scale government:
Within the chaos of incompetency lies the great danger to our Republic. A proliferation of unseen, unaccountable and thus uncontrollable nodes of influence have arisen to deal with the complexity of governing a continental enterprise from the center. The result is what political scientists have traditionally called the “politics of muddling through.” Accordingly, any serious notion of “democratic accountability” has long since vanished.
Those who face the daunting challenge of reinstating a truly democratic America should see this as an opportunity. The tide of history is with us. We are not challenging a healthy, robust and competent democracy. We are challenging a tired democracy and therefore a weak democracy; a splendid achievement in the history collective human behavior that unfortunately has been hobbled by its inability to reign in its natural appetite for aggrandizing authority — even though the cost of this authority was paid in terms of democratic legitimacy. …
In 1789, we created the framework for a continental, federal enterprise, dividing authority between the states and the central government. More importantly we trumped any chance of coherent central enterprise (one thinks of Canada) by setting our national institutions against one another. …
The structure of our democracy is currently out of whack. Power to the states and within the states, power to the towns and within the towns, power to the individual and within each individual the awareness that it is in the small community alone that true distinctiveness can be accurately perceived, assessed, and rewarded – where authentic individualism is possible.
We live in a democratic moment and place. Let us behave accordingly.
Sailer writes earlier this week that the Indian election shows that as “strange as it may seem to consumers of the American press, conservative nationalism is the leading political trend of the 2010s.”
From Office of Hawaiian Affairs Kamana’opono Crabbe’s remarks at a press conference on Monday:
A second reason for my questions to Secretary Kerry stems from our Hawaiian community. My staff and I have held some 30 community meetings in the past two months regarding our proposed process to rebuild our nation. In that same period we also held two governance summits with key community leaders. At these gatherings, and in other virtual contexts, we heard repeatedly concerns about engaging in a process of rebuilding a nation when-following the research of many legal, historical, and political experts-our nation continues to exist in the context of international law.
Such concerns have led our community to request more time in the nation rebuilding process to have questions– such as I raised with Secretary Kerry– fully explored and shared with our people so that they can make well-informed decisions throughout the process.
The Hawaiian community needed to know that I was inquiring about the very matters they sought to bring forward. And this is the reason I felt it was imperative not only that I ask the questions but that the community be aware of the inquiry.
However, recognizing the gravity of the questions posed, I met with Chair Machado before making the letter public. I explained that my questions were a matter of due diligence and risk management to avoid OHA missteps in its nation rebuilding facilitation. I believed I had her consent to proceed with sharing publicly my letter to Secretary Kerry. Unfortunately, it is now apparent that we walked away from that meeting with a misunderstanding and misinformation.
Despite disagreements that will need to be worked out between myself and OHA’s trustees, I am certain that the Board and I stand firmly together in our commitment to do all that we appropriately can to reestablish a Hawaiian nation. I look forward to engaging with the trustees in the ho’oponopono, which Chair Machado graciously suggested, so that we can work collectively to Ho’oulu Uihui Aloha, to Rebuild a Beloved Nation.
We must succeed in our efforts for the good of our lahui, our community, and our families for generations to come.
Chairwoman Machado disputes that he consulted with her before sending the letter. The OHA trustees had a very interesting meetingon Thursday, with a big crowd supporting Crabbe. Related: The militarized Pacific.
From one of the translated letters of Tibetan prisoner Goshul Lobsang, written in prison, September 2012. He died on March 19:
I have no regrets, although all of a sudden, I may be compelled to separate from the path of life that [I have been treading along] with my beloved mother, siblings, wife and children. I may have to depart with [feelings] of cold, heavy sadness, but I have no sense of guilt in my heart.
My clear conscience is my only asset in this world. I don’t possess anything other than this, and I don’t need anything other than this.
[But] my only regret that weighs heavily on my heart is the lack of profound sense of solidarity among our people, because of which we are unable to achieve a strong unified stand.
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In the Salt Lake Tribune yesterday, a letter to the editor written by a Republican name-checks Lincoln and asks:
The right-wing fanatics who would have the federal government hand over all public lands in Utah, Nevada, etc., remind me of the pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine. When would they like to hold the referendum on secession from the United States?
Chris Roth says the Cliven Bundy standoff is the harbinger of a new “silly season.” State legislators from a number of states are getting involved, including Matt Shea:
Four more county committees forming for the Jefferson statehood effort, one is working with Tea Party Patriots.
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Nationalia looks at Yorkshire autonomy, the Bavarian Party’s attempt to get a representative in the European Parliament, and the Occitan Nation Party’s pro-stateless peoples (and pro-EU) message.
Timothy Snyder and Leon Wieseltier are in Kiev this weekend.
Scottish Tory MEP says in an address supporting a Spanish unionist MEP that Scottish independence “would trigger a wave of secessionist movements across the EU.”
Israel clears up a rumor that they were going to transfer sovereignty of the tomb of David and the Cenacle to the Vatican.
Our moral sphere should not be stretched beyond the scale appropriate for an individual human life. That does not mean that we are indifferent to suffering outside that scale, nor that there’s something wrong with giving to charity or volunteering. Telescopic as an adjective is meant more pejoratively than categorically; to reject telescopic morality is not to say that our concern for far matters should be reduced to zero, just as rejecting gluttony does not mean that we should stop eating entirely.
Nevertheless, I am very pessimistic about our ability to have a non-negligible impact on large scale and distant matters.
While generations of Québécois had felt estranged from a spiritually apostate France after the 1789 Revolution, this antirevolutionary ethos vanished during the 1960s. The French Revolution had begun when Louis XVI had convoked the Estates General. Shortly thereafter, the Third Estate, consisting of commoners, rose up and abolished the first two estates, representing the clergy and nobility, declaring itself l’Assemblée nationale, that is, the National Assembly.
In 1968, in an eerie echo of the events of nearly two centuries earlier, Québec similarly abolished the upper chamber of its provincial legislature, le Conseil legislatif, while the lower chamber, l’Assemblée legislative, changed its name to – you guessed it – l’Assemblée nationale! The French Revolution had finally caught up with La Belle Province. That same year saw the formation of the Parti québécois, which sought a wholly French-speaking nation separate from Canada.
Political philosophers and historians have given lots of attention to Calvinism as an engine of modern liberal (read constitutional) politics. Whether it’s resistance theory, the Dutch rebellion, or the so-called Presbyterian revolution of the British colonies in North America, students of Calvinism believe they have a firm read on Reformed Protestant politics as an inherently rebellious outlook, one that won’t let any human authority encroach on the Lordship of Christ. (Why we didn’t celebrate 1861 along with 1776, 1689, and 1567 prior to getting right with race is a bit of an inconsistency.)
That sounds good in theory, and it certainly turns out Calvinist (New, Neo, or Denominational) in large numbers for Fox News. But it doesn’t make sense of history where context matters.
The NSA’s “new collection posture,” as shown in the NSA documents reproduced in Greenwald’s book, is: “Sniff it all, know it all, collect it all, process it all, exploit it all, partner it all.” In short, they aim to abolish the concept of privacy – and if they are now targeting political “radicalizers,” as one of their documents puts it – not Al Qaeda, but American political dissidents – then our old republic is no more. The Constitution means nothing: the Bill of Rights is abolished, and we are living under a de facto “democratic” dictatorship. …
As it stands … anyone in America who has ever expressed a “radical” idea is now a potential target.
Nothing short of a revolution is going to reverse this monstrous reality. Whether it comes in a peaceful form – perhaps some combination of electoral and legislative action – in which the warlords of Washington are thrown out on their ears, or some other way is not for me to say. No one can know the future. What I do know, however, is this: one way or another, the monster must be slain.
… a partisan prosecutor launched “secret John Doe” investigations to terrify the entire conservative community and to remove them from the political conversation. Even though these Wisconsinites have been charged with nothing, they’ve been subjected to pre-dawn raids, warrants, subpoenas, and other harassment.
Independence referenda began today in Donetsk and Luhansk. The U.S. will not recognize them.
Earlier this week word got out that the CEO of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, Kamana‘opono Crabbe, had submitted a letter (pdf here) to Secretary of State John Kerry, asking him to clarify the status of the Hawaiian Kingdom under international law. The trustees quickly rescinded it, and Crabbe’s job may be in jeopardy. Various Hawaiian nationalists have started a petition to support him, emphasizing that, “The questions posed represent the perspectives of the broader Hawaiian and Hawai‘i community and their search for justice regarding the United States supported illegal overthrow of the constitutional Hawaiian Kingdom on Jan 17th, 1893.” According to the Hawaiian Kingdom blog, one trustee has already distanced himself from the letter rescinding Crabbe’s inquiry, and OHA has a press conference scheduled tomorrow in Honolulu to address the matter.
One of the founders of the Libertarian Party of Puerto Rico calls for “micro-independence” for the territory. Chris Roth is skeptical in light of Obama’s opposition to secession and the need to get an independence referendum through Congress.
Sarawak secession is back in the news, with one lawmaker saying 75 percent of Sarawakians would opt for separation if a vote were held today. (More commentary here.) There’s been friction between the Borneo and peninsular parts of Malaysia for some time, and the disparity in development between the two has only gotten more stark since the issue cropped up in 1966.
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Pat Buchanan on the War Party’s unsuccessful effort to take down Walter Jones.
Roger Busbice on the “fighting bishop” Leonidas Polk:
Louisiana seceded on January 26, 1861 with the enthusiastic support of Bishop Polk. In his homily at Christ Cathedral, he declared that secession was fully justified and indicated that, henceforth, the Book of Common Prayer would be altered to eliminate prayers for the President and Congress of the United States and that, instead, prayers would be offered for the Governor and the Legislature of Louisiana.
This edit became a source of controversy when a zealous Yankee commandant insisted the Bishop of Natchez pray for Lincoln. Bishop Elder asked for intercession from Washington, and Lincoln magnanimously intervened.
Psychedelic band blamed for Nigerian kidnapping. (Related, from the World Socialists, on AFRICOM)
We now know the name of the agent that shot Ibragim Todashev in Florida, following the Boston Marathon bombing. He appears to have an interesting history.
The Telegraph rounds up ten micronations, including Copenhagen’s Freetown Christiania, the Hutt River Principality, and the venerable Conch Republic.
Yuba County Board of Supervisors see joining the so-called State of Jefferson and leaving California behind as a no-brainer for one big reason.
“We feel that we are nothing more than tax collectors for the state,” County Supervisor Andy Vasquez said. “We don’t count.”
Vasquez says Yuba County doesn’t get any attention or money for the issues that matter to them.
“Certain countries that type of society where you don’t have any representation and they tell you what to do and take all your money is called slavery and we seem to be worker ant’s here,” Vasquez said.
But it’s not just county leaders who want to leave California.
“All the money is being used down in L.A. for all kinds of stupid reasons and they don’t give the money here to fix the roads,” Marysville resident Phil Ross said.
“Without some separation, southern California owns northern California. They take what they want,” said Don Noblin, another Marysville resident.
Butte County is reportedly considering it as well. (I posted some photos from the surprisingly well-attended town halls in Northern California a while back, which you can see here.)
There’s a new book out by Jon D. Olsen on the U.S.’s fraudulent claim to Hawai’i, blurbed by Thomas Naylor of the Second Vermont Republic.
Venetians take to the streets for St. Mark’s Day, in a protest that might have included a ‘tank’ (converted tractor) had 24 of the alleged co-conspirators not been arrested:
Chris Roth takes a look at at separatism in Eastern Ukraine and the Caucasus:
Ultranationalist demands by ethnic Russians and their supporters in eastern Ukraine have now shifted from talk of Crimea or the Donetsk People’s Republic and are now focussing on creating a larger entity to be carved out of southern and eastern Ukraine to be calledNovorossiya, or “New Russia,” using Czarist Russia’s name for the region. The most high-profile proponent of the idea is Pavel Gubarev, the imprisoned “people’s governor” of Donetsk, whose covertly-Kremlin-backed government-building takeover in that southeastern oblast (provincial) capital last month sparked the uprising and military confrontation in the region. From prison in Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, last week, Gubarev said that “we”—i.e. the Donetsk People’s Republic, which he considers already independent—“want to join the new federative State of Novorossiya, which will build its own relations with the Customs Union of Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan in the future.” The leadership of the neighboring “Lugansk People’s Republic” plans to join the Donetsk republic in holding the May 11th vote. He added that plans were underway—as other Russian-backed rebels have said also—to hold an independence referendum on May 11th in Ukraine’s rebel-held regions.
He also points out an interesting Russian report on the geography of 2035 that points to a “ultranationalist mentality” behind some of their geostrategic thinking:
In 2035 in western Europe, the report envisions, quite feasibly (see map below), independent republics in Scotland, Catalonia, the Basque Country, northern Italy, and even Corsica, Sardinia, and Sicily. Less feasibly, a reunified Ireland will become closer to Scotland than the rump United Kingdom is. Southeastern France’s Provence region is to have become an Arab republic—something that presumably Marine Le Pen will not take lying down. But in the Russian view this is how the French government will solve the inevitable “multicultural collapse”—by picking a region and sticking all the unassimilable Muslims there.
The cold, hard truth is that smaller governments have better track records of managing their finances, as well. Critics will say that tiny countries in Central America or Africa have had issues with high interest rates and sovereign debt. However, Singapore is running budget surpluses. The countries mired in red ink are the big, imperialist powers.
Singapore, Switzerland, and others of their ilk have better things to do.
That’s why secession is a key stepping stone in the future of self-determination and sovereignty.
According to Rasmussen, two-thirds of Americans see the federal government as a special interest group looking out for itself. Consent of the governed? Pah!
