Reposted from Transition Voice
Editor’s Note: Whatever one believes about secession, one thing is certain: The current government shutdown is a glaring testimony to the empire’s collapse as a result of, among other things, its inability to govern itself. Fascist Republicans on the right and enabling Democrats a little further to the left. This is not about politics; it’s about the collapse of empire which will invariably result in some form of secession.–CB
Despite all the talk, the federal government shutdown hasn’t greatly affected daily life for most Americans so far. Some have been hit hard, especially federal employees, those receiving certain benefit payments, and tourists planning to visit the Smithsonian or a national park. But as apocalypses go, a couple weeks without “non-essential” federal services has been underwhelming for most American families.
Things could get worse if the closure were to extend from weeks into months. But judging by past shutdowns, it’s likely that Obama and Congressional Republicans will soon reach a deal to restart the federal services that have been suspended since Congress failed to pass a funding bill by the start of the federal fiscal year on October 1.
The World War II Memorial will then be open again. But that won’t mean that America can go back to normal.
The new normal
Normal ended for most of us when the economy crashed in 2008 and the government shutdown shows definitively that no help can be expected from Washington for ordinary citizens who continue to suffer. Despite economists having declared the Great Recession finished in June 2009, in today’s economy most Americans outside the top 1% are still battling financial hardship:
- One in five families relies on food stamps, food banks and other feeding programs to make sure that they’ll have enough to eat next week
- Overdue student loan debt and youth unemployment remain at all time highs
- For the last decade, the stock market has soared, helping the rich, but middle-class household income has declined
It’s clear that America’s middle class is actually suffering through what Paul Krugman has called a new Depression or even what James Howard Kunstler has more ominously dubbed The Long Emergency.
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair
The shutdown demonstrates beyond doubt that Washington, plagued by partisan intransigence and captured by corporate special interests, has finally become unable to effectively govern the United States.
In 2009, early in the economic downturn, Paul Starobin made the case in his book After America: Narratives for the Next Global Age that governing America from Washington has become such an unwieldy system as to justify alternative arrangements. His perspective is even more prescient after the government shutdown.
“The present-day American Goliath may turn out to be a freak of a waning age of politics and economics as conducted on a super-sized scale — too large to make any rational sense in an emerging age of personal empowerment that harks back to the era of the yeoman farmer of America’s early days,” Starobin wrote in the Wall Street Journal.
It’s easy to laugh at Texans who’ve threatened for years to leave the Union. But with dysfunction in Washington sure to grow, Texas secessionists may have the last laugh. Image: Jesse 1974/Flickr.
Starobin comes at the problem of an oversized America from the right-wing — he rails against imperial overreach by President Obama and the expansion of social programs that Republicans refer to as “Big Government.”
But there are plenty of people on the left who also think that America has gotten too big to operate as a democracy. Just take the example of the secessionist movement in ultra-liberal Vermont, whose adherents want the freedom to eat local and organic and exclude nuclear power without interference from Washington.
While the mainstream media seem to find the idea of secession laughable at best, groups on both sides of the political edge are embracing the eventual breakup of the United States as not merely thinkable but even desirable.
Secession from Oregon to Texas
Here are five reasons why secessionist movements like the microbrew-friendly Republic of Cascadia in the Pacific Northwest and the immigrant-unfriendly Texas Nationalist Movement may ultimately win some degree of autonomy from Washington:
- Political Polarization — Does anyone think that, after Boehner and Obama make a deal to re-open the government, the two parties will begin to work harmoniously in the national interest anytime in the near future? Look for the trend of take-no-prisoners partisan warfare to ramp up, not down, in coming years, bringing the machinery of national government to a halt again and again through future battles over the federal debt, social programs, financial regulations and environmental protection. Partisan fighting will alienate voters and make clear the increasing impotence of the federal government.
- Resentment of the One Percent — No one benefits more from centralized power than big corporations and the rich people who own them — and who pull the strings of power in Washington. Coming from opposite ends of the political spectrum, both Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party are populist movements critical of centralized power in both the government and the economy. As the economy continues to decline and government falters, movements on the political extremes will gain followers as more families have to struggle to keep their homes on part-time jobs. Americans who fall out of the middle class will grow angry and resentful at the rich for so cruelly rigging the system against the ordinary wage-earner.
- Economic Collapse — The collapse of an economy that requires continuous growth but is stuck on a planet with finite resources may be unavoidable, but gridlock in Washington will help to bring it on sooner as the ripple effect from a decline in federal spending acts as a negative stimulus, killing jobs and causing businesses to close. After a few more government shutdowns, the next financial collapse could make 2008 look tame. As the national economy fails to deliver the prosperity that Americans used to expect, they’ll look more to economic solutions from local manufacturing to local currency.
- Climate Chaos — Mounting costs to deal with the superstorms, derechos and other weather disasters that will become both more frequent and more damaging due to runaway climate change will stretch federal, state and local budgets to their breaking points. As schools, roads and social services are cut to pay for rebuilding hurricane-ravaged cities or constructing sea walls to protect coastal areas from rising seas, populations will grow restless. Initially, they’ll look to Washington for help. When that help disappoints or fails to arrive altogether, citizens will fall back on their states and localities, making the federal government increasingly irrelevant.
- Peak Oil — By itself, depletion of fossil fuels will raise the cost of energy beyond the point at which transportation costs will make governing any nation of continental scale, whether the U.S. or Russia or China, impractical. In the long run, an ongoing reduction in travel by air, road and rail in response to rising costs for liquid fuels from crude oil will weaken the national ties forged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by the rise of those same forms of transportation. This will provide more slack to breakaway regions and secessionist movements. In the short-term, a 1970s-style energy crisis or some more catastrophic oil shock may be the Black Swan event needed to push the weakened and brittle edifice of national government and global trade over the edge into collapse.
All of these factors could clear the way for regional secession movements that could ultimately break up the U.S. and all of North America into half a dozen or more regional nations. In the meantime, as the economy continues to cool down, the climate continues to heat up and Americans get more cynical about Washington and Wall Street, campaigns for everything from local food to local money could coalesce into a grand localist wave like the Transition movement, which already boasts nearly 150 Transition Towns in the U.S. committed to building local autonomy.
In a future where central government has clearly lost control, that local autonomy could evolve into local sovereignty.
– Erik Curren, Transition Voice
After #5 peak oil add #6:coming real soon the elimination of the labor force,replaced by Robot Technology.
I don’t expect the Union to dissolve,but if history is any guide 2016 will see the emergence of a strong man, Mr clean who will clean up this mess.
“Mr. Clean” doesn’t exist. What does exist is an empire in tatters that can do nothing but completely unravel.
Don’t forget Near Term Extinction (NTE). While it is interesting in an academic way that nations will unravel, the truth is we will experience this unraveling in tandem with catastrophic runaway climate chaos. This will all be wrapped up in twenty years–game over–hello undiscovered country. Of course, this extinction will not happen all at once. Think exponential. Gradually increasing chaos that we are just barely able to stay in front of will morph rapidly into completely out of control chaos. People will come to realize deeply that it is all coming to an end. Some will seek religion. Some will kill themselves. Others will take advantage and attempt to profit through violence. Still others will seek solace in group activities. All in all, it will be a dark time where some will find truth. But most will simply die as thousands of generations have done before them. All die, NTE or not. It just happens that we all die together. Let us hope for a general enlightenment.
Richard, overall I agree with you, but I think we have to be very careful about “knowing with certainty” what will happen in the future. Life/nature/the universe is always throwing us curves that we can’t possibly anticipate—both curves that we call “good” and curves that we call “bad.” The sanest way to navigate whatever the future holds is through conscious spiritual and emotional preparation for living with uncertainty and NOT knowing. Thank for taking the time to comment.
“Don’t forget Near Term Extinction (NTE). While it is interesting in an academic way that nations will unravel, the truth is we will experience this unraveling in tandem with catastrophic runaway climate chaos. This will all be wrapped up in twenty years–game over….”
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So the IPCC is so wrong as to be irrelevant? So the entire climate science community of the world is wrong to the point of irrelevancy? Is there a conspiracy, then, to lie to the public about the direction we’re heading in?
I think you exaggerate. And I think the IPCC is also exaggerating. You overstate what’s in the “pipline” already. The IPCC understates the risks of further CO2 emissions — in the case of their recently announced “carbon budget”.
Those who insist that it’s already too late to shift our world off worst case scenarios like NTE are probably only contributing to disengagement, inaction and self-fulfilling prophesy. Perhaps you are longing for the end?
I’m not.
Yes, Erik is waiting for “the end,” and so am I. What end? The end of infinite growth; the end of endless air, water, soil, and food pollution; the end of Wall St; the end of infinite resource wars. James, please stop trying to redecorate empire and allow yourself to imagine a world WITHOUT industrial civilization. Please work to terminate it as soon as possible which is the ONLY way we can slow down runaway climate change which now has a life of its own. The only exaggeration here is your addiction to the status quo. Regardless of what you think about secession, it’s going to happen whether we like it or not. It’s inevitable. A collapsing empire cannot govern itself. As it spirals down into total collapse, there will be secession movements—some feasible, some insane. Gee, I wonder how much worse they might govern their regions than the United States government is NOT governing the nation.
“James, please stop trying to redecorate empire and allow yourself to imagine a world WITHOUT industrial civilization.”
Nowhere have I advocated for such a redecoration. In many places, however, I’ve actively imagined and shared my imagination of a world without industrial civilization. But the path to such an end would necessarily be a stepping down from the status quo in steps and stages — very swiftly, I’d hope. In other words, the industrial production that we can currently justify would include biccles, shovels, hoes, sheet glass (for passive solar homes), etc. What we cannot continue is such like as jet travel, giant coal-fired (or natural gas heated) houses with few occupants, automobiles, consumer culture…. I’m actively imagining and working toward a world with a tiny fraction of the present CO2 emissions … and with economic and social justice, far from a decorated empire.
Most people find me absurdly optimistic. And this may be so. But though our chances are very small, if one is an odds-taker, I prefer to try anyway.
“Please work to terminate it as soon as possible which is the ONLY way we can slow down runaway climate change which now has a life of its own.”
Maybe it does. Maybe it doesn’t. It’s hard to assess. No science on Earth is so complex as climatology. All we know for near certain is that we should take the Precationary Principle very seriously, and lower the levels of risk as best we can. This does, of course, mean abandonment of the current world as we know it. But people will not abandon it unless we offer them a plausible route to such an abandonment, a way or direction to travel, a decent life outside of the fossil culture.
“The only exaggeration here is your addiction to the status quo.”
What!?! I’m the radical one here. You don’t get more radical than me. Where do you see in me an addiction to the status quo industrial civilization nightmare?
Leonard Cohen said (in his song, The Future):
Things are going to slide, slide in all directions/
Won’t be nothing/
Nothing you can measure anymore/
The blizzard, the blizzard of the world/
has crossed the threshold/
and it has overturned/
the order of the soul/
We’re likely to be nearing such a phase of chaos/complexity, which would be an essentially unthinkable event — literally unthinkable. But are we there yet?
For right now, we have a few measurments we might apply. And some carefully measured decisions to make. A butterfly is flapping its wings somewhere. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect
When things begin to slide in all directions, immeasurable and unthinkable, a world we cannot now think or imagine might be borne of the ashes of the old. Whether it be a hell or a heaven might depend on the initial conditions we must prefigure today.
Typo correction: biccles = bicycles.
“Apocalypse Imminent: Climate Crisis Will Turn To Reality By The End Of The Decade”
http://www.countercurrents.org/cc101013.htm
“And while the doomsday clock is ticking, with the first signs of change expected at the end of this decade, researchers of the study claim that it is too late to reverse and mankind needs to prepare for a world where the coldest years will be warmer than what we remember as the hottest.
The study predicts that even if we utilized all resources to stop and halt our current emissions, the changes are irrevocable and can only be postponed.”
Industrial civilization could metaphor in an automated Robot civilization or into some form of modern dark age or ???
An Empire that is forced to retreat from world domination does not necessarily mean the breakup of the union. To day the government is split into two competing forces the outcome of witch is not yet clear, the Constitution is no longer a longer an instrument of cooperation but has turned into its opposite (like all things do),The United states are not an island onto itself but its future is tied with the global geopolitical situation. There are many many roads to the future even the possibility of ww3.
Granted the future looks dismal,but to predict a precise path is foolish. And yes growth is finite.
I’m reminded of the once-popular “Battlestar Galactica” series. As all viable options get removed from the table and the remnants of humanity flee into the unknown, we’re still left with the ever-present fall back of internal strife and squabbling amongst ourselves.
Let the south go, the north carries their deadwood anyway
This is not about a North/South thing. Please visit the website of the Second Vermont Republic:
http://vermontrepublic.org/
I’ll soon be reviewing their new book “Most Likely To Secede” which is a vision of a Progressive vision of an independent republic separate from empire.