83
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2025
83 points (100.0% liked)
news
24090 readers
762 users here now
Welcome to c/news! Please read the Hexbear Code of Conduct and remember... we're all comrades here.
Rules:
-- PLEASE KEEP POST TITLES INFORMATIVE --
-- Overly editorialized titles, particularly if they link to opinion pieces, may get your post removed. --
-- All posts must include a link to their source. Screenshots are fine IF you include the link in the post body. --
-- If you are citing a twitter post as news please include not just the twitter.com in your links but also nitter.net (or another Nitter instance). There is also a Firefox extension that can redirect Twitter links to a Nitter instance: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/libredirect/ or archive them as you would any other reactionary source using e.g. https://archive.today . Twitter screenshots still need to be sourced or they will be removed --
-- Mass tagging comm moderators across multiple posts like a broken markov chain bot will result in a comm ban--
-- Repeated consecutive posting of reactionary sources, fake news, misleading / outdated news, false alarms over ghoul deaths, and/or shitposts will result in a comm ban.--
-- Neglecting to use content warnings or NSFW when dealing with disturbing content will be removed until in compliance. Users who are consecutively reported due to failing to use content warnings or NSFW tags when commenting on or posting disturbing content will result in the user being banned. --
-- Using April 1st as an excuse to post fake headlines, like the resurrection of Kissinger while he is still fortunately dead, will result in the poster being thrown in the gamer gulag and be sentenced to play and beat trashy mobile games like 'Raid: Shadow Legends' in order to be rehabilitated back into general society. --
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
US Balkanization 2025
California gives the federal government way more in tax money than it gets back. California basically bankrolls the rest of the country. They also grow most of the produce in the country.
The US needs California way more than California needs the US. California should absolutely cut off funds to the federal government if this happens and start just paying for their own shit. Suddenly they’ll have a huge budget surplus.
imagine thinking taxes paid and digital 1's and 0's in bank accounts is somehow representative of material reality.
california is just another a shape on a map drawn by colonizers less than 200 years ago. the idea it can do its own thing because it pays big taxes on its big monies is the same line of thinking that is inspiring tariff brains to raise taxes on imports to "pay down" sovereign debt and "balance trade". money has value because it can be used to buy stuff and pay people to do things. empire works for the core because it sends money all over the world in exchange for materials to satisfy the core's demands. controlling the money is more important than having the money, which are two different things. it's the difference between having a bunch of currency at your house and having a globally integrated banking system.
anyway, all money is federal. so california decides to stop paying income tax on their 3 card monte games (intellectual property of hollywood and silicon valley)... who cares? the feds will print the money needed to do the things to re-assert control. the arm of US power over its states is in the banking system, and good luck operating a functional payroll system of direct deposits for state workers and large organizations if the feds even tickle the "get fucked" button. i mean, i guess the brain trust of silicon valley could rapidly launch some kind of state crypto, but i would give that about 72 hours before somebody walks away from the wildly short arm of Technorepublic of California with a few hundred bazillion.
balkanization is a dead carcass being carved up by predators. the shoulder doesn't "win" just because it used to hold the backpack when the body was alive.
Good post comrade
This is all true, the important part is that California has leverage and there’s only so much the feds can do before they say “fuck off” with strength to back it. If nothing else it’s mutually assured destruction.
Vs like, if Louisiana tried to fight back the feds could squash it without blinking.
California, Florida, and Texas seem like prime candidate states where the oligarchs might decide that they can turn them into their personal fiefdoms in the near future.
And Cali is the strongest of the 3 because it actually has the resources to support itself. Florida’s an appendage that’s one bad hurricane season from being wiped off the map. Texas is hot and dry and getting hotter and drier, I don’t know that they have enough water or arable land to make it on their own.
Especially Texas. They are effectively the nuclear weapons power within the US, as that's where the Pantex facility is.
North Dakota is sprinting towards this with an eye towards climate change (see actions of Burgum and Gates)
the dark horse of the sedition race :)
They do put in the work though (to be awful lol)
I think Florida and Texas would annex Alabama. Mississippi, and Louisiana, at minimum.
Yeah once the process starts then other states will exit the union too.
I think the annexation of the Gulf states by FL and TX with have racial motivations, not merely that the Gulf states will also secede
My understanding is that California needs the water that does not reside within California... Something of a mild problem for going independent, they would need to secure that water source as part of California. It's a necessary requirement for them to be independent.
Almost all of California’s water comes from inside California.
The only one of these water sources that come from outside the state is the Colorado River, and that’s an amount of water that could relatively easily be made up from internal sources.
I’m not sure why people think this about California aside from it technically being one of the Colorado River states, but all the other Colorado River states that’s like their only source of water, Cali it’s really an afterthought.
An independent California could still work if the state government mostly abandons LA and transfers population to the less desert-y north (I don't think they're willing or able to do this)
California is not a very unified state. If CA were to leave the union, NorCal and SoCal would be a moderate challenge to keep integrated, and you would very rapidly see the Central Valley coming up with a motion to break from California, à la West Virginia.
It's one of at least 5 states that are straining at the seams and would rip open if the right crisis came about.
Can you point out the 5 for us?
CA, WA, and IL each have very strong and active secessionist sentiments in the more inland parts of the state. Technically and notoriously, OR does too, but the population east of the Cascades is maybe 1/8 of the state's total population- in other terms, substantially less than the population of Wyoming.
Most of VA has a massive resentment towards the "[people] north of Richmond", and that feeling is very much mutual. PA has large cultural, economic, and geographic barriers between east and west, and while I don't know of people that actively want it to split, in case of national restructuring I have a hard time seeing the state retain its present boundaries.
There are also states like FL, TX, LA, and NY that have vocally diverse sub-state identities, but I don't see those being out of alignment enough to shake up state boundaries. Not very easily, at least.
east washington and oregon have some "greater idaho" nazis, confederate illinois hates chicago more than they like money. Republic of New Afrika probably isn't popular enough an idea to come back but maybe something like that would be a thing again if we're collapsing. Texas could probably split up more after a while, but pretty much the whole country is on some urban/rural shit and there'd probably be separatist counties anywhere you have rural areas next to a red state and far from their liberal capital like western minnesota.
people in the US identify with the country way more than state or region for the most part unlike the group divisions in a Yugoslavia or anywhere with colonial straight line borders so it's hard to have any confidence in how it would break down.
In California and Oregon it’s called Jefferson State. Basically a bunch of chud libertarians want to make a very poor 51st state.
If I recall correctly the problem is at least in terms of income tax that's automatically withheld for most people. Same thing with corporate taxes. You'd have to get thousands, tens of thousands of companies to agree to violate federal law and face massive federal backlash including you know jail for the owners for this to work. Sorry to say but those companies aren't going to go along with it. They're going to continue sending Washington DC the withholdings from employee paychecks and from their own owed taxes because they don't want that kind of trouble and are not revolutionaries.
In olden times this might have been more practical for the state as they could just hold up physical money cars leaving with this stuff but these days its all electronic so there's really no border to police.
This is all factually correct, but I hope Californian comrades are talking to their local liberals about this stuff. "Normie" types don't like what's going on and are down to think about what life would look like without Trump in the picture.
This has never been in the media before so you can finally kick of an actual political conversation that has very few existing brainworms.
Maybe in a decade "West coast secessionist" viewpoints have a space in the conversation, although at the fringe of the mainstream (thinking along the lines of "alt-right"). This sort of internal tension is bad for the empire and good for the global south. I think socialists should be advocating for it. We know that the Democratic voter base, and even many Republican voters are to the left of the Democratic Party on a lot of social issues. Weakening the DNC means we could actually get some socdem shit done while things are unstable and on decline.
Ideals don't drive the wheels of history, but they do steer them. As you said, this is not something that is practical materially, but on the ideological battlefield, we need to wield it as a rallying point for something to the left of neoliberalism. If everything goes well, you'd probably get the West coast to be another Canada tbh. Maybe would even make sense to annex in to Canada?
Apparently Gavin Newsom had the exact same thought I did
Yes, but
this is not true. California benefits from access to the US dollar. An independent California would either have to come up with its own currency - one that is not artificially inflated by being the world trade currency - or use the dollar at the mercy of the US.
Sorry wasn’t trying to imply “California must go it on its own, it’ll be better off.” Just that the feds can’t just force California to do things because California could absolutely cripple the United States single-handedly.
Like, if Louisiana tried to fight the feds they’d instantly be under complete occupation and the US as a whole wouldn’t even notice. If California does it, the entire country’s economy shuts down, grocery store shelves fo empty, and it would take a large scale invasion to retake control.
The feds can absolutely force California to do whatever the feds want. There is not a snowball's chance in hell of any of the institutions or the political establishment in California putting up real resistance. The most they will do is what they are already doing which is try to score political points by saying shit that they think makes them sound "tough" to their voters. When push actually comes to shove all of them will fold like Origami.
Not to mention how much of the stock market relies on companies based in CA.