It is hardly surprising that many things which must soon happen in the rest of the USA appear first the Golden State

VHeadline's Washington DC-based commentarist Chris Herz writes: In so many ways California is the leading state in the USA. For many years the city of Los Angeles has been our largest city in terms both of area and of population. The city of San Francisco is central to our cultural life ... and never forget that the world center for computer technologies lies in the area around San Jose: Silicon Valley.

• With all that it is hardly surprising that many things which must soon happen in the rest of the USA appear first in this our Golden State.

State Comptroller Chaing has just announced that the state government will shortly be paying many of its obligations in what will amount to bearer bonds, not in US currency. The national bankruptcy is not some event in either the near or distant future, it is now. Other state governments must soon follow, commencing first with Massachusetts. New York likewise is in desperate trouble. California ranks all by its lonesome as the seventh or eighth, depending on who you ask, largest economy in the world. And of course New York and Massachusetts likewise are important players in the economic landscape.

Economist Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Laureate in economics, pointed out over a year ago that at that time Iraq and Afghanistan had already cost the US a minimum of US$3 trillion. The Obama regime will be continuing both wars, prosecuting the Afghan adventure into the indefinite future. Equally perniciously, no one in official Washington seriously proposes any other limits to the world-wide military commitments of the imperial regime. Thus there can be no real reform of the swollen military budgets which have for so many decades been so prominent a feature of US economic activity. And which, like the Soviet Union before us have directly led us into the abyss of national bankruptcy. Further, because of the conservative political alignment of the USA taxes which are collected in California tend to be disproportionately spent in the southern states, homeland to social and political reaction, wherein are centered so many military installations and defense corporations.

The political choices for corporate globalization, for social and economic stratification, and for racism which have characterized the years since Reagan's presidency could not have occurred without the solidly conservative south. And now who can doubt the extent to which this sort of politics has likewise contributed to the economic devastation spreading across the whole world. In short there is here all the evidences of a big net loss in tax revenues from the more liberal states of the Pacific and Eastern coasts to the solidly and safely conservative areas of the south and interior west. This game too has been on-going for too many years.

What we see now in California is the first move toward the disunity of the USA ... the state is in effect printing its own money ... and what can be a more essential attribute of sovereignty?

Because of the size and resiliency of her economy California's money, whatever they may choose to call it, may actually in the long term become a better store of value than the venerable and vulnerable US dollar!

There is no question that if California were to somehow become independent she would be much more prosperous than she is. Being stuck in the bankrupt federal union, one which resolutely pursues policies obnoxious to most Californians, is proving very costly indeed. The smaller states of the Pacific coast, Washington and Oregon likewise suffer net losses in revenue by virtue of their membership in the United States.

Alaska has had for years an active independence movement, one for which the serving governor, Sarah Palin, lately the Republican vice presidential candidate, has frequently expressed sympathy.

Of course it is not likely that we will see in California in the near term a serious movement for secession equal to that in Alaska, but certainly politics tends to follow closely after economics.
In New England, in our state of Vermont too there has been, half in jest, but half seriously too, a movement to remove from the USA and to join Canada. As Massachusetts, the economic center of that region, is stricken with the economic bankruptcy spreading from Washington like ripples on a pond perhaps this centrifugal force will gather more strength ... but what is clear is that, if somehow, we were able to rid ourselves of the states of the old southern Confederacy everyone else would be the better for it.

From the imperial capital

Chris Herz
chris.herz@vheadline.com