When Giants Fall

A Xenophobic Shift

While some may be surprised, the shift was predictable (in fact, I predicted it in my last book): worsening economic conditions have stoked growing xenophobia, even in countries that have in recent years welcomed outsiders with open arms. Naturally, that has fomented the rise of political movements and parties that feed on those sentiments, as The Economist reveals in "The Far Right in Northern Europe: On the March":

Populist anti-immigration parties are performing strongly across northern Europe

FRANCE is not the only European country suffering a far-right surge. In an arc of countries spreading north-east from the Netherlands, populist parties are cutting a swathe through politics, appealing to electorates with various blends of nationalism, Euroscepticism (and euro-scepticism) and outright xenophobia.

 

Back in the Crosshairs

Throughout history, individuals and groups with certain characteristics have proved to be convenient scapegoats. At various times and places, people of the "wrong" religion, race, or social class have been picked on, discriminated against, and ostracized because they have been deemed to be responsible for whatever has gone wrong, even if they had nothing to do with it. That said, one group, immigrants -- especially those in a country illegally -- has consistently been in the crosshairs of public ire during hard times. And right now, as ABC News reports in "Immigration Wars: More States Looking at Arizona-Style Laws," it looks to be happening again.

2010 Saw Record Number of Immigration Laws, 2011 Projected to Surpass That

Undocumented nannies, housekeepers or lawn caretakers in the state of Texas can perhaps breathe easier about deportation. While new legislation in the Texas House of Representatives would make it a state crime to hire undocumented workers, it excludes those employed in single-family households -- in other words, them.

The bill, introduced by state GOP Rep. Debbie Riddle, is the first of its kind in the country. It's unique in that while it appeases those who want more stringent immigration laws, it doesn't subject Texas households to the rule that would mainly apply to businesses and large employers.

Critics of the bill say it's hypocritical. Supporters charge it's needed in a state where the Hispanic population continues to climb swiftly.

Though it remains stuck in political limbo, the bill reflects a wider push toward implementing tougher anti-immigration laws at the state level. More than 100 immigration-related bills are pending in the Texas legislature alone, including those that would give state and local police officers the authority to enforce federal immigration laws, make English the official language and prevent undocumented students from getting in-state tuition and scholarships.

States across the country, including Georgia and Oklahoma, where the legislatures debated immigration bills this week, have been mulling controversial Arizona-style immigration laws.Thirty-seven states are considering tougher immigration bills, with multiple bills pending in some states.

"The mere fact that Arizona law has sprung up in over 24 other states within a few months of passage, I believe, is historic," said William Gheen, president and spokesman of Americans for Legal Immigration, a group that supports stricter immigration laws.

"We are going to pass more immigration enforcement legislation in the states in 2011 than any year prior. And what we don't get done in 2011 we will get done in 2012," he vowed.

States enacted a record number of bills and resolutions on immigration issues during the 2010 sessions, and every state that met in regular session in 2010 considered laws related to immigrants, according to a National Conference of State Legislatures report. Forty-six state legislatures and the District of Columbia passed 208 laws and adopted 138 resolutions for a total of 346.

The momentum, in part, is being driven by the ascent of Republicans in state legislatures and the U.S. House of Representatives. Many GOP leaders, especially in Southern and Midwestern states, made immigration a flagship issue of their campaigns.

Temperature's Rising

In "Self-Immolation Reports Spread Through North Africa," CNN reports on a rare and disturbing form of protest that is suddenly gaining ground in one region of the world.

The popular protests in Tunisia that have caused upheaval in the government were sparked by Mohamed Bouazizi, a 26-year-old unemployed college graduate, who set himself on fire in protest. He later died. Now, reports are coming in from other countries in the region -- Egypt, Algeria, and Mauritania -- that other demonstrators are turning to self-immolation.

...

"The Arab world's horrific new trend: self-immolation," wrote Blake Hounshell of the foreignpolicy.com blog on Monday.

"There is something horrifying and, in a way, moving about these suicide attempts. It's a shocking, desperate tactic that instantly attracts attention, revulsion, but also sympathy," Hounshell, Foreign Policy's managing editor, wrote.

One reason for the trend, notes global intelligence firm Stratfor in a YouTube video report, "Dispatch: Self-Immolation as a Political Tool," is that it allows protestors' message "to spread in a way the government can't really control."

Let's hope it doesn't catch on here.

What You Can Count On

Generally speaking, you can count on three things happening when times are tough (especially over an extended period): 1) increasing efforts to restrict the free flow of goods and services across borders; 2) a heightened interest in measures that favor locally-produced products and domestically-based businesses over foreign counterparts; and, 3) as Bloomberg details in "More States Seeking to Follow Arizona's Push for Tougher Immigration Rules," a growing push for policies and rules that target immigrants, legal or otherwise:

Arizona’s get-tough approach to illegal immigration has sparked court challenges likely to take years to resolve. Randy Terrill, a Republican state lawmaker from Oklahoma, won’t be waiting to see what judges decide.

Terrill is among dozens of state legislators across the U.S. drafting measures that match or go further than the Arizona law, which requires police to check the immigration status of people stopped for questioning. He’s readying legislation to allow Oklahoma authorities to seize and keep the vehicle of anyone found to be harboring an illegal immigrant who is a passenger, regardless of whether smuggling is suspected. The measure would categorize undocumented immigrants as “human contraband.”

Elsewhere, Missouri and Mississippi are among states where lawmakers intend to offer bills similar to Arizona’s “probable cause” law. And legislators in several states want to require employers to verify the immigration status of workers.

The state-by-state efforts underscore the federal gridlock on immigration policy. “States are stepping in where the federal government can’t or won’t act,” said Terrill.

About 300 immigration-related bills were introduced in statehouses in 2005, said Ann Morse, who directs the Immigrant Policy Project for the National Conference of State Legislatures. In each of the last two years, the figure reached about 1,500, she said.

In 2011, state legislators could push the number higher. “Every indication I get is, they’re not done,” Morse said.

The New View

(Image: Source.)

Growing up in America -- you know, "the land of the free and the home of the brave" -- I couldn't help but think how divorced from reality George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four was from the world I knew.

But now, sixty-one years after the novel was first published, developments like those described in the latest installment of a disturbing Washington Post series, "Top Secret America," make me think how prescient the British author truly was.

Nine years after the terrorist attacks of 2001, the United States is assembling a vast domestic intelligence apparatus to collect information about Americans, using the FBI, local police, state homeland security offices and military criminal investigators.

The system, by far the largest and most technologically sophisticated in the nation's history, collects, stores and analyzes information about thousands of U.S. citizens and residents, many of whom have not been accused of any wrongdoing.

The government's goal is to have every state and local law enforcement agency in the country feed information to Washington to buttress the work of the FBI, which is in charge of terrorism investigations in the United States.

Other democracies - Britain and Israel, to name two - are well acquainted with such domestic security measures. But for the United States, the sum of these new activities represents a new level of governmental scrutiny.

This localized intelligence apparatus is part of a larger Top Secret America created since the attacks. In July, The Washington Post described an alternative geography of the United States, one that has grown so large, unwieldy and secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs or how many programs exist within it.

Today's story, along with related material on The Post's Web site, examines how Top Secret America plays out at the local level. It describes a web of 4,058 federal, state and local organizations, each with its own counterterrorism responsibilities and jurisdictions. At least 935 of these organizations have been created since the 2001 attacks or became involved in counterterrorism for the first time after 9/11.

(Search our database for your state to find a detailed profile of counterterrorism efforts in your community.)

The months-long investigation, based on nearly 100 interviews and 1,000 documents, found that:

* Technologies and techniques honed for use on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan have migrated into the hands of law enforcement agencies in America.

* The FBI is building a database with the names and certain personal information, such as employment history, of thousands of U.S. citizens and residents whom a local police officer or a fellow citizen believed to be acting suspiciously. It is accessible to an increasing number of local law enforcement and military criminal investigators, increasing concerns that it could somehow end up in the public domain.

* Seeking to learn more about Islam and terrorism, some law enforcement agencies have hired as trainers self-described experts whose extremist views on Islam and terrorism are considered inaccurate and counterproductive by the FBI and U.S. intelligence agencies.

* The Department of Homeland Security sends its state and local partners intelligence reports with little meaningful guidance, and state reports have sometimes inappropriately reported on lawful meetings.

The need to identify U.S.-born or naturalized citizens who are planning violent attacks is more urgent than ever, U.S. intelligence officials say. This month's FBI sting operation involving a Baltimore construction worker who allegedly planned to bomb a Maryland military recruiting station is the latest example. It followed a similar arrest of a Somali-born naturalized U.S. citizen allegedly seeking to detonate a bomb near a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Portland, Ore. There have been nearly two dozen other cases just this year.

"The old view that 'if we fight the terrorists abroad, we won't have to fight them here' is just that - the old view," Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told police and firefighters recently.

Click here to read the rest.

The (Continuing) Stasification of America

Based on the following NetworkWorld.com report, "DHS to Launch SAR Database. In Suspicion and Surveillance We Trust?" it's apparent that Washington remains intent on emulating what Wikipedia describes as "one of the most effective and repressive intelligence and secret police agencies in the world."

Homeland Security will launch its suspicious activity report database to connect the dots. Citizens are encouraged to spy on and report suspicious activity of neighbors.

On October 12, DHS will implement its database of "suspicious activity reports" (SAR). SAR programs encourage intelligence and homeland security officials, law enforcement officers, emergency responders, and even the public to report “suspicious” activities of neighbors and strangers to law enforcement and intelligence agencies. According to the Center For Investigative Reporting, (CIR) "Reports will be submitted not just by state and local police and agencies within the Department of Homeland Security, but also private corporations that control economic and infrastructure assets considered high-profile targets for terrorists." This nationwide database will "connect the dots" in order to find terrorists who are conspiring to carry out an attack. The DHS reports will be overseen by the Justice Department.

The Nationwide SAR Initiative (NSI) states some of its successes such as, "The continued priority to safeguard the privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties of our nation’s residents (including the assurances that not only is information shared appropriately with authorized personnel but that the information that is exchanged is “quality” information)." According to NSI overview (pdf), tips will go through a vetting process by a fusion center.

The Washington Post's Top Secret America found that about 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security, and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States. They produce 50,000 reports a year – 136 a day.

How many more might be produced after DHS implements its SAR database?

ACLU said all these SARs reports "can yield only one outcome: an ocean of data about innocent individuals that will overwhelm the investigative resources of the authorities." Furthermore, the ACLU reported, "Director Michael Leiter complained that the NCTC receives 'literally thousands' of pieces of intelligence every day. Adding innocuous information about the everyday activities of Americans will only increase this burden on intelligence resources."

A senior homeland security official, John Cohen, stressed that "authorized users of the [SARs] system are instructed on how to distinguish between behavior that warrants scrutiny and lawful conduct that doesn’t justify attention from the government," reported CIR. Cohen added, "Users would need a legitimate reason for searching the reports, and they would have to document the justification."

Of course, those with nothing to hide have little to worry about -- right?

Pretty scary.

What country do we live in again?

Time for Another Round of Populist Rhetoric

It's that time again -- time for another round of populist rhetoric.

After falling beneath the radar for awhile, talk is again surfacing that lawmakers in Washington will be looking to take out their frustrations on one particular Asian nation for the myriad problems we face at home.

In the latest edition of the Wall Street Journal's Big Interview, Under Secretary of State for Economic, Energy and Agricultural Affairs and former Goldman Sachs executive (naturally) Robert Hormats discusses what might happen if one of our biggest trading partners "fails to address concerns about its currency and trade practices."

WASHINGTON -- China risks a backlash from the U.S. Congress unless it becomes more responsive to international concerns about its currency value and trade practices, a top U.S. State Department official warned.

Difficult economic conditions, inflated unemployment levels, and election-year politics create a politically combustible environment, said Robert Hormats, under secretary of State for economic, energy and agricultural affairs, told The Wall Street Journal. A lack of action by the Chinese to address U.S. concerns about currency issues and intellectual-property protections could encourage a more protectionist agenda on Capitol Hill.

"We're likely to see some legislation offered that would be adverse to Chinese interests" if more steps aren't taken, Mr. Hormats warned.

Here is the video:

A Little Paranoid?

In both of my last two books, I suggested that harsh economic realities will eventually force desperate governments around the world, including the United States, to introduce a variety of measures to try and ensure their own survival.

Aside from cranking up the printing presses, the list of potential options includes:

• Imposition of foreign exchange and other controls on capital
• Limits on cash withdrawals and the issuance of private credit
• Mandated government-sponsored savings and investment plans
• Involunary conversion of retirement and other private assets into government bonds or other public-sector liabilities.

Am I being a little paranoid about what Washington or the governments of other developed nations might one day get up to? Perhaps. But then again, after reading the following post from Martin Wolf's Exchange, "How Likely Is Financial Repression?" maybe not.

First comes financial crisis; then comes sovereign debt crisis; then comes financial repression. This is the view of Carmen Reinhart, co-author of This Time is Different, the masterly study of financial crises through the ages. I recently had a fascinating conversation on this topic with her, here in New York, where I have been living since the beginning of April.

So the question for the exchange is: how likely is financial repression? What forms might it take? Might this even be the end of the era of globalised finance?

Her argument is very plausible. It is also supported by the history of both advanced and emerging countries. First, governments encourage credit expansion by the financial sector. As a result, a mountain of bad debt is piled up. Then, at some point, comes panic. At this stage, governments nationalise the liabilities of their financial sector and, more important, find their revenues collapsing, along with the economy. Huge fiscal deficits then emerge and public debt starts to soar. Of course, frequently, governments short-circuit this financial route and simply run huge and unsustainable fiscal deficits in good times. Either way, an unsustainable fiscal position leads, sooner or later, to a sovereign debt crisis, particularly if governments borrow in foreign currencies, short term, or both (as often happens, in such situations).

What do governments do when it becomes expensive to borrow? They promise to mend their ways, of course. But, by now, it is often too late: nobody believes them. So they tell the central bank to buy their bonds, which starts a run on the currency. Pegged exchange rates collapse and floating exchange rates fall. Inflation becomes an imminent threat.

At this point, desperate governments look for ways to force institutions to hold their bonds, willy nilly. This is the point at which financial repression begins: banks are forced to hold government bonds, for “liquidity”; pension funds are forced to hold government bonds, for “safety”; interest rate ceilings are imposed on private lending; to prevent “usury”; and, if all else fails, exchange controls are imposed, to ensure nobody can easily escape from such regulations.

Sad to Say

It's sad to say, but a recent post at The Coming Depression blog, "20 Signs That The US is Becoming A Totalitarian Police State," doesn't sound irrational, alarmist, or maniacal once you read through it. Here are the first ten items on the list:

#1) A new bill being pushed by Senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman would allow the U.S. military to round up large numbers of Americans and detain them indefinitely without a trial if they "pose a threat" or if they have "potential intelligence value" or for any other reason the President of the United States "considers appropriate".

#2) Lawmakers in Washington D.C. working to create a new immigration bill have decided on a way to prevent employers from hiring illegal immigrants: a national biometric identification card all American workers would be required to obtain.

#3) Barack Obama is backing a plan to create a national database to store the DNA of people who have been arrested but not necessarily convicted of a crime.

#4) Just to get on an airplane, Americans will now have to go through new full-body scanners that reveal every detail of our exposed bodies to airport security officials.

#5) If that wasn't bad enough, the Transportation Security Administration has announced that airport screeners will begin roving through airports randomly taking chemical swabs from passengers and their bags to check for explosives.

#6) Starting this upcoming December, some passengers on Canadian airlines flying to, from or even over the United States without ever landing there, will only be allowed to board their flights once the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has determined they are not terrorists.

#7) Organic milk is such a threat that the FDA has been conducting military style raids on Amish farmers in Pennsylvania.

#8) An NYPD officer has broken his silence and has confessed that innocent citizens are being set up and falsely arrested and ticketed in order to meet quotas.

#9) A growing number of police departments across the U.S. are turning to mobile camera systems in order to fight motor vehicle theft and identify unregistered cars.

#10) For decades, Arizona has been known as "the sunset state", but lately many frustrated residents have started calling it "the surveillance state".

Click here to read the rest.

Is It So Far-Fetched?

At one time, the notion of a financial Armageddon in the United States, or trillion-dollar federal budget deficits as far as the eye can see, would have been dismissed as laughable.

Not any more, of course.

Is it so far-fetched, then, as The End of the World blog argues in "20 Signs That The United States Is Rapidly Becoming A Totalitarian Big Brother Police State," that another, more frightening development is also underway?

#1) A new bill being pushed by Senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman would allow the U.S. military to round up large numbers of Americans and detain them indefinitely without a trial if they "pose a threat" or if they have "potential intelligence value" or for any other reason the President of the United States "considers appropriate".

#2) Lawmakers in Washington D.C. working to create a new immigration bill have decided on a way to prevent employers from hiring illegal immigrants: a national biometric identification card all American workers would be required to obtain.

#3) Barack Obama is backing a plan to create a national database to store the DNA of people who have been arrested but not necessarily convicted of a crime.

#4) Just to get on an airplane, Americans will now have to go through new full-body scanners that reveal every detail of our exposed bodies to airport security officials.

#5) If that wasn't bad enough, the Transportation Security Administration has announced that airport screeners will begin roving through airports randomly taking chemical swabs from passengers and their bags to check for explosives.

#6) Starting this upcoming December, some passengers on Canadian airlines flying to, from or even over the United States without ever landing there, will only be allowed to board their flights once the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has determined they are not terrorists.

#7) Organic milk is such a threat that the FDA has been conducting military style raids on Amish farmers in Pennsylvania.

#8) An NYPD officer has broken his silence and has confessed that innocent citizens are being set up and falsely arrested and ticketed in order to meet quotas.

#9) A growing number of police departments across the U.S. are turning to mobile camera systems in order to fight motor vehicle theft and identify unregistered cars.

#10) For decades, Arizona has been known as "the sunset state", but lately many frustrated residents have started calling it "the surveillance state".

Click here to read the rest.

Winning at Our Expense

Americans are getting angry at those who helped create the mess we are in and who have nonetheless benefitted from efforts to "fix" it. Naturally, one might assume I'm referring to the financial industry. But maybe people should also be directing their attentions towards another group that has not only had a hand in screwing things up, but which regularly seems to win at taxpayers' expense. In "Lobbyists on Pace for Record Year," Politico details just how good bad times have been for the influence-peddling set.

Main Street has had a tough year, losing jobs and seeing little evidence of the economic revival that experts say has already begun.

But K Street is raking it in.

Washington’s influence industry is on track to shatter last year’s record $3.3 billion spent to lobby Congress and the rest of the federal government — and that’s with a down economy and about 1,500 fewer registered lobbyists in town, according to data collected by the Center for Responsive Politics.

Many lobbying firms have escaped the worst of the corporate belt-tightening, thanks, in large part, to the ambitious agenda set out by President Barack Obama — who, ironically, came to Washington with a pledge to break what he considered the undue influence of special-interest lobbyists.

Plenty of sectors have scaled back their K Street spending, including traditional big spenders like real estate and telecommunications. But Obama’s push for legislation on health reform, financial reform and climate change has compensated for the grim economic times.

And that’s after Obama kicked off the year with a massive economic stimulus package — and every major business sector tried to get a piece of the action.

“Lobbyists love it ... when you’ve got an activist agenda like this, and you’ve got serious problems like this, and people want to do something about it,” said James Thurber, director of American University’s Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies.

“It is the most active time that I have ever seen in the advocacy business — from 1973 on,” Thurber added.

“We’ve never had as good a year,” said one lobbyist whose shop deals mostly with financial services and health care issues. “It’s been a tremendously busy year, and it’s going to keep getting that way,” the lobbyist said, noting that both health care and financial reform will remain active as congressional action moves from drafting legislation to implementation to the inevitable fixes.

The year-end lobbying expenditure figures don’t come out until late January, but Thurber and others predict that the top line number will exceed the $3.3 billion spent in 2008. Groups spent $2.5 billion during the first three quarters of 2009, which is a slightly faster quarterly pace than 2008, according to CRP.

'We Want Out'

To most people, "protectionism" refers to the imposition of tariffs, quotas, and rules that favor local firms over foreign-based outfits. But there are also other ways that nations can control the flow of goods and services across their borders. They can, for instance, provide subsidies to exporters -- or, if you like, bailouts to domestic automakers and banks -- or introduce stringent quality standards that are difficult for outsiders to adhere to.

Discussions about "secession" also conjure up a relatively narrow range of possibilities. Ask most people about the term, and it is usually not long before they start talking about mass uprisings and bloody civil wars. But as with the notion of protectionism, the better known examples aren't necessarily the only options. In "State Secession and Counter-Economics," Imperial Twilight discusses another way in which people might choose to exert more control over their future:

Dave Montgomery of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram surveys the rise of secession movements across the United States:

Fanned by angry contempt for Washington, secession movements have sprouted up in perhaps more than a dozen states in recent years. In Vermont, retired economics professor Thomas Naylor leads the Second Vermont Republic, a self-styled citizens network dedicated to extracting the sparsely populated New England state from "the American Empire."

And on the other side of the continent, Northwestern separatists envision a "Republic of Cascadia" carved out of Oregon, Washington and the Canadian province of British Columbia.

While most Americans dismiss the breakaway sentiments, sociologists and political experts say they are part of a larger anti-Washington wave that is rapidly spreading across the country.

The article quotes Vermont secessionist Thomas Naylor, who makes his case succinctly:

"The empire has lost its moral authority. It’s unsustainable, ungovernable and unfixable," he said. "We want out."

Montgomery engages in pointless, liberal hand wringing over tangential issues of racism, environmentalism, and capital punishment (on the last point, he absurdly lumps a theoretically independent Texas together with Iran and North Korea, in a desperate invocation of the ridiculous "Axis of Evil" concept). He avoids examining the constitutional merits of secession, which makes this a typically shallow MSM piece. Yet his moderate tone, and willingness to let the activists occasionally speak for themselves, presents the secessionists in an almost favorable light. In fact, he unwittingly aids them by giving readers the names of secessionist organizations, so that these can be Googled and contacted by potential recruits.

Will any of these tiny organizations gain sufficient political influence to achieve their goals? Based on the historical record of American secession, I doubt it. Both the American Revolution and the War Between the States (a.k.a. the Civil War) were instigated and led by men who already held power: sitting politicians at the state level. Those leaders were careful to deliberate amongst themselves to ensure coordinated action, to marshal their forces, and to present a united front to the central government. There are no signs of this yet. If the governors of several or more states call a convention and propose an anti-federal alliance, then we'll know the stage is being set for a regional revolt.

However, there is another kind of secession, which radical libertarians call counter-economics. This strategy does not pit local governments against the center, but calls for individuals and small networks of people to set up a parallel economy. The goal is not power, but freedom. Polish Solidarity activist Wiktor Kulerski described it this way:

“This movement should create a situation in which authorities will control empty stores, but not the market; the employment of workers, but not their livelihood; the official media, but not the circulation of information; printing plants, but not the publishing movement; the mail and telephones, but not communications; and the school system, but not education.”

Kulerski's words appear in a fine article published by The Freeman, "A Tribute to the Polish People". It's a fascinating study of how to beat a modern police state without resorting to violence, which is a game the state usually wins. Significantly, the Poles were able to outmaneuver and undercut their oppressors even though they had no cell phones or Internet. Of the six points Kulerski enumerates, the American state is already retreating in the fields of information, publishing, communications, and education.

The two secession strategies are not mutually exclusive, and it's reasonable to expect that counter-economics will do much to pave the way for a territorial breakup or shrinkage of the present United States. The more useless the central government is seen to be, the more willing are citizens and local politicians to part company with it.

Secession Talk Going Mainstream?

According to the American Secession Project, there are at least 300 "active autonomist and secessionist movements" around the world, including the following listed for the United States and its territories:

Alaska
Political: Alaskan Independence Party

California
California Secessionist Party, Committee to Explore California Secession
Proposed state: California Republic

Hawaii
Political: Hawaii Independence Party

New England
Political: New England Confederation Movement

New York City
Political: Peter Vallone, Free City of Tri-Insula

Upper Peninsula of Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota
Proposed state: North Star Republic

Pacific Northwest
Political: Cascadian National Party
Proposed state: Cascadia

The South
Cultural/Political: League of the South
Political: Neo-confederate movement
Political: Southern Party (Defunct)
Political: Southern Independence Party
Proposed state: Confederate States of America

Southwest United States
Political: La Voz de Aztlán, American Patrol, National Vanguard, MEChA
Proposed state: Aztlán (to be dependent upon Mexico), Various "white homelands" or "white cultural homelands"

Texas
Proposed state: Republic of Texas

Vermont
Proposed state: Green Mountain Republic of Vermont
Political: Second Vermont Republic http://www.vermontrepublic.org/

Puerto Rico
Puerto Rican Independence Party (PIP), Movimiento Independentista Nacional Hostosiano (MINH), Socialist Front (FS), National Congress for the Descolonizations (CONADE).
Political/violent: Puerto Rican Nationalist Party, Pro-Independence Universitarian Federation (FUPI), Union of Socialist Youth (UJS).
Violent: Boricua Popular Army (Macheteros) , National Liberation Armed Forces (FALN).

Guam

Hawaii: Hawaiian sovereignty movement
Political: Nation of Hawai‘i and other nationalist groups attempting to reassert the sovereignty of the Kingdom of Hawai‘i (internationally recognized as an independent country until 1893). (These groups argue that it is incorrect to apply the terms "secede", "secession" and "secessionist" in the case of Hawai‘i since, in their view, the 1898 annexation by the U.S. was never valid in the first place.)

Northern Marianas

Up until now, most, if not all, of these efforts have generally been dismissed or ignored. But amid Washington's efforts to expand its influence over a broader range of activities, resentments are beginning to stir and some are pushing back. A Wall Street Journal commentary by Paul Starobin, author of After America: Narratives for the Next Global Age, entitled "Divided We Stand," suggests such ideas may be on the road to mainstream acceptance.

What would California look like broken in three? Or a Republic of New England? With the federal government reaching for ever more power, redrawing the map is enticing, says Paul Starobin

Remember that classic Beatles riff of the 1960s: “You say you want a revolution?” Imagine this instead: a devolution. Picture an America that is run not, as now, by a top-heavy Washington autocracy but, in freewheeling style, by an assemblage of largely autonomous regional republics reflecting the eclectic economic and cultural character of the society.

There might be an austere Republic of New England, with a natural strength in higher education and technology; a Caribbean-flavored city-state Republic of Greater Miami, with an anchor in the Latin American economy; and maybe even a Republic of Las Vegas with unfettered license to pursue its ambitions as a global gambling, entertainment and conventioneer destination. California? America’s broke, ill-governed and way-too-big nation-like state might be saved, truly saved, not by an emergency federal bailout, but by a merciful carve-up into a trio of republics that would rely on their own ingenuity in making their connections to the wider world. And while we’re at it, let’s make this project bi-national—economic logic suggests a natural multilingual combination between Greater San Diego and Mexico’s Northern Baja, and, to the Pacific north, between Seattle and Vancouver in a megaregion already dubbed “Cascadia” by economic cartographers.

Devolved America is a vision faithful both to certain postindustrial realities as well as to the pluralistic heart of the American political tradition—a tradition that has been betrayed by the creeping centralization of power in Washington over the decades but may yet reassert itself as an animating spirit for the future. Consider this proposition: America of the 21st century, propelled by currents of modernity that tend to favor the little over the big, may trace a long circle back to the original small-government ideas of the American experiment. 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. The society may find blessed new life, as paradoxical as this may sound, in a return to a smaller form.

This perspective may seem especially fanciful at a time when the political tides all seem to be running in the opposite direction. In the midst of economic troubles, an aggrandizing Washington is gathering even more power in its hands. The Obama Administration, while considering replacing top executives at Citigroup, is newly appointing a “compensation czar” with powers to determine the retirement packages of executives at firms accepting federal financial bailout funds. President Obama has deemed it wise for the U.S. Treasury to take a majority ownership stake in General Motors in a last-ditch effort to revive this Industrial Age brontosaurus. Even the Supreme Court is getting in on the act: A ruling this past week awarded federal judges powers to set the standards by which judges for state courts may recuse themselves from cases.

All of this adds up to a federal power grab that might make even FDR’s New Dealers blush. But that’s just the point: Not surprisingly, a lot of folks in the land of Jefferson are taking a stand against an approach that stands to make an indebted citizenry yet more dependent on an already immense federal power. The backlash, already under way, is a prime stimulus for a neo-secessionist movement, the most extreme manifestation of a broader push for some form of devolution. In April, at an anti-tax “tea party” held in Austin, Governor Rick Perry of Texas had his speech interrupted by cries of “secede.” The Governor did not sound inclined to disagree. “Texas is a unique place,” he later told reporters attending the rally. “When we came into the Union in 1845, one of the issues was that we would be able to leave if we decided to do that.”

Such sentiments resonate beyond the libertarian fringe. The Daily Kos, a liberal Web site, recently asked Perry’s fellow Texas Republicans, “Do you think Texas would be better off as an independent nation or as part of the United States of America? It was an even split: 48% for the U.S., 48% for a sovereign Texas, 4% not sure. Amongst all Texans, more than a third—35%—said an independent Texas would be better. The Texas Nationalist Movement claims that over 250,000 Texans have signed a form affirming the organization’s goal of a Texas nation.

Secessionist feelings also percolate in Alaska, where Todd Palin, husband of Governor Sarah Palin, was once a registered member of the Alaska Independence Party. But it is not as if the Right has a lock on this issue: Vermont, the seat of one of the most vibrant secessionist movements, is among the country’s most politically-liberal places. Vermonters are especially upset about imperial America’s foreign excursions in hazardous places like Iraq. The philosophical tie that binds these otherwise odd bedfellows is belief in the birthright of Americans to run their own affairs, free from centralized control. Their hallowed parchment is Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, on behalf of the original 13 British colonies, penned in 1776, 11 years before the framers of the Constitution gathered for their convention in Philadelphia. “The right of secession precedes the Constitution—the United States was born out of secession,” Daniel Miller, leader of the Texas Nationalist Movement, put it to me. Take that, King Obama.

Today’s devolutionists, of all stripes, can trace their pedigree to the “anti-federalists” who opposed the compact that came out of Philadelphia as a bad bargain that gave too much power to the center at the expense of the limbs. Some of America’s most vigorous and learned minds were in the anti-federalist camp; their ranks included Virginia’s Patrick Henry, of “give me liberty or give me death” renown. The sainted Jefferson, who was serving as a diplomat in Paris during the convention, is these days claimed by secessionists as a kindred anti-federal spirit, even if he did go on to serve two terms as president.

The anti-federalists lost their battle, but history, in certain respects, has redeemed their vision, for they anticipated how many Americans have come to feel about their nation’s seat of federal power. “This city, and the government of it, must indubitably take their tone from the character of the men, who from the nature of its situation and institution, must collect there,” the anti-federalist pamphleteer known only as the Federal Farmer wrote. “If we expect it will have any sincere attachments to simple and frugal republicanism, to that liberty and mild government, which is dear to the laborious part of a free people, we most assuredly deceive ourselves.”

In the mid-19th century, the anti-federalist impulse took a dark turn, attaching itself to the cause of the Confederacy, which was formed by the unilateral secession of 13 southern states over the bloody issue of slavery. Lincoln had no choice but to go to war to preserve the Union—and ever since, anti-federalism, in almost any guise, has had to defend itself from the charge of being anti-modern and indeed retrograde.

But nearly a century and a half has passed since Johnny Rebel whooped for the last time. Slavery is dead, and so too is the large-scale industrial economy that the Yankees embraced as their path to victory over the South and to global prosperity. The model lasted a long time, to be sure, surviving all the way through the New Deal and the first several decades of the post-World War II era, coming a cropper at the tail end of the 1960s, just as the economist John Kenneth Galbraith was holding out “The New Industrial State,” the master-planned economy, as a seemingly permanent condition of modern life.

Not quite. In a globalized economy transformed by technological innovations hatched by happily-unguided entrepreneurs, history seems to be driving one nail after another into the coffin of the big, which is why the Obama planners and their ilk, even if they now ride high, may be doomed to fail. No one anymore expects the best ideas to come from the biggest actors in the economy, so should anyone expect the best thinking to be done by the whales of the political world?

A notable prophet for a coming age of smallness was the diplomat and historian George Kennan, a steward of the American Century with an uncanny ability to see past the seemingly-frozen geopolitical arrangements of the day. Kennan always believed that Soviet power would “run its course,” as he predicted back in 1951, just as the Cold War was getting under way, and again shortly after the Soviet Union collapsed, he suggested that a similar fate might await the United States. America has become a “monster country,” afflicted by a swollen bureaucracy and “the hubris of inordinate size,” he wrote in his 1993 book, “Around the Cragged Hill: A Personal and Political Philosophy.” Things might work better, he suggested, if the nation was “decentralized into something like a dozen constituent republics, absorbing not only the powers of the existing states but a considerable part of those of the present federal establishment.”

Kennan’s genius was to foresee that matters might take on an organic, a bottom-up, life of their own, especially in a society as dynamic and as creative as America. His spirit, the spirit of an anti-federalist modernist, can be glimpsed in an intriguing “mega-region” initiative encompassing greater San Diego County, next-door Imperial County and, to the immediate south of the U.S. border, Northern Baja, Mexico. Elected officials representing all three participating areas recently unveiled “Cali Baja, a Bi-National Mega-Region,” as the “international marketing brand” for the project.

The idea is to create a global economic powerhouse by combining San Diego’s proven abilities in scientific research and development with Imperial County’s abundance of inexpensive land and availability of water rights and Northern Baja’s manufacturing base, low labor costs and ability to supply the San Diego area with electricity during peak-use terms. Bilingualism, too, is a key—with the aim for all children on both sides of the border to be fluent in both English and Spanish. The project director is Christina Luhn, a Kansas native, historian and former staffer on the National Security Council in Ronald Reagan’s White House in the mid-1980s. Contemporary America as a unit of governance may be too big, even the perpetually-troubled state of California may be too big, she told me, by way of saying that the political and economic future may belong to the megaregions of the planet. Her conviction is that large systems tend not to endure—“they break apart, there’s chaos, and at some point, new things form,” she said.

The notion that small is better and even inevitable no doubt has some flavor of romance—even amounting to a kind of modern secular faith, girded by a raft of multi-disciplinary literature that may or may not be relevant. Luhn takes her philosophical cue not only from Kennan but also from the science writer and physicist M. Mitchell Waldrop, author of “Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos.”

Even for the hard-edged secessionist crowd, with their rapt attentiveness to America’s roots, popular texts in the future-trend genre mingle in their minds with the yellowed scrolls of the anti-federalists. “The cornerstone of my thought,” Daniel Miller of the Texas Nationalist Movement told me, is John Naisbitt’s 1995 best seller, “Global Paradox,” which celebrates the entrepreneurial ethos in positing that “the bigger the world economy, the more powerful its smallest players.”

More convincingly, the proposition that small trumps big is passing tests in real-life political and economic laboratories. For example, the U.S. ranked eighth in a survey of global innovation leadership released in March by the Boston Consulting Group and the National Association of Manufacturers—with the top rankings dominated by small countries led by the city-state republic of Singapore. The Thunderbird School of Global Management, based in Arizona, has called Singapore “the most future-oriented country in the world.” Historians can point to the spectacularly inventive city-states of Renaissance Italy as an example of the small truly making the beautiful.

How, though, to get from big to small? Secessionists like Texas’ Miller pledge a commitment to peaceful methods. History suggests skepticism on this score: Even the American republic was born in a violent revolution. These days, the Russian professor Igor Panarin, a former KGB analyst, has snagged publicity with his dystopian prediction of civil strife in a dismembered America whose jagged parts fall prey to foreign powers including Canada, Mexico and, in the case of Alaska, Russia, naturally.

Still, the precedent for any breakup of today’s America is not necessarily the one set by the musket-bearing colonists’ demanded departure from the British crown in the late 18th century or by the crisis-ridden dissolution of the U.S.S.R. at the end of the 20th century. Every empire, every too-big thing, fragments or shrinks according to its own unique character and to the age of history to which it belongs.

The most hopeful prospect for the USA, should the decentralization impulse prove irresistible, is for Americans to draw on their natural inventiveness and democratic tradition by patenting a formula for getting the job done in a gradual and cooperative way. In so doing, geopolitical history, and perhaps even a path for others, might be made, for the problem of bigness vexes political leviathans everywhere. In India, with its 1.2 billion people, there is an active discussion of whether things might work better if the nation-state was chopped up into 10 or so large city-states with broad writs of autonomy from New Delhi. Devolution may likewise be the future for the European continent—think Catalonia—and for the British Isles. Scotland, a leading source of Enlightenment ideas for America’s founding fathers, now has its own flourishing independence movement. Even China, held together by an aging autocracy, may not be able to resist the drift towards the smaller.

So why not America as the global leader of a devolution? America’s return to its origins—to its type—could turn out to be an act of creative political destruction, with “we the people” the better for it.