Californians Suggest ‘Calexit’ in Wake of Donald Trump Win

As an outsider, this is hilarious. I think many non-American westerners regard California as the 'joke state', given it contains orange tans and celebrities and far too many soy lattes. Sort of the state that time forgot (it's still 1999 there, as far as we can tell). In my humble opinion, which is worth precisely nothing, you should let 'em go. Perhaps even help them leave.

 

California wouldn't last 1 month with all their crybaby millenials.

Texas on the other hand would do just fine.

 

Here's more:

http://mashable.com/2016/11/18/california-secede-from-rest-of-union/#a1gWBsVWsqqB
#CalExit: The California Secession Movement is real, and could work
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WHAT'S THIS?
Thousands of protestors marched in LA on Nov. 12 to protest the election of Donald Trump as president. Now some of the state's residents are pushing for full independence.
Thousands of protestors marched in LA on Nov. 12 to protest the election of Donald Trump as president. Now some of the state's residents are pushing for full independence.IMAGE: DAVID MCNEW/GETTY IMAGES
2016%2f09%2f22%2f41%2fmarissaheadshot1.634ce
BY MARISSA WENZKE
7 HOURS AGO
As is the case in so many other parts of America, thousands of California residents are protesting the 2016 election results. The difference? Their frustration has swelled into support for perhaps the ultimate solution to the Golden State's strong distaste for president-elect Donald Trump—secession.

SEE ALSO: Calexit: Californians want to secede now that Trump won


The idea of a #Calexit blew up on Twitter right after Trump's win. It started as a series of jokes—Tweets about the state's best-known exports, of sorts (from Apple devices to weed), along with maps and memes showing what an independent California would look like.

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Yes California @YesCalifornia
Are you down with #Calexit like this supporter is?
2:40 PM - 10 Nov 2016
1,269 1,269 Retweets 2,401 2,401 likes
It wasn't long before a mere wave of social media output coalesced into something more. A group leading the movement toward state independence, Yes California, grew from some 1,500 members to around 12,000 after Trump's win, its president Louis Marinelli told Mashable.

It might sound like an extreme, reactive mode of thinking, but the reality is that every state has tried seceding at some point, mostly through petitions to the White House. But the probability of any kind of modern-day state secession actually happening is incredibly low. There's no set process for breaking away from the beloved union, as the part of the Constitution that explains how a state can join never explains how it can leave.

But: it's actually sort of, kind of possible.

California values and a Trump presidency
The Golden State's opposition to Trump has been made clear via the thousands who protested in the streets of San Francisco and Los Angeles. The morning after election night, even some of the state's top lawmakers said they felt like a Trump presidency just didn't mesh with California values.

"Today, we woke up feeling like strangers in a foreign land, because yesterday Americans expressed their views on a pluralistic and democratic society that are clearly inconsistent with the values of the people of California," California Senate President Kevin de Leon and Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon said in a joint statement. "We have never been more proud to be Californians."

They added that the state would continue being a "refuge of justice and opportunity for people of all walks, talks, ages and aspirations – regardless of how you look, where you live, what language you speak, or who you love."

That's around the time some Silicon Valley elites joined in the California secession dreaming, such as Shervin Pishevar, angel investor and co-founder of Hyperloop One, and Marc Hemeon, CEO and founder of Design Inc.

8 Nov
Shervin ✔ @shervin
1/ If Trump wins I am announcing and funding a legitimate campaign for California to become its own nation.
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Marc Hemeon ✔ @hemeon
@shervin I support you in this effort let me know what I can do to help
11:18 PM - 8 Nov 2016
15 15 Retweets 77 77 likes
Can #Calexit actually happen?
Since the end of the Civil War, no state has ever broken from the United States. But all of them have tried. After Obama' re-election in 2012, petitions were organized in all 50 states and at least six of them had over 25,000 signatures. But of all the states, Texas has probably tried the hardest to break away.

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Krystal Rios @krystalrios
California wants to secede & so should Texas! Come on Texas we always threaten to secede, let's be a republic again! #Texit
8:11 AM - 10 Nov 2016 · Houston, TX
1 1 Retweet 1 1 like
Texan calls for secessions go back to the 19th Century, and haven't stopped since. In 2012, one Texas petition had over 125,000 signatures, more than any other state. But the White House rejected its plea, referencing the 1869 Supreme Court case of Texas v. White—when the federal government shut down another one of the state's attempts to secede. That case described the U.S. as an "indestructible union."

In the White House's response to Texas, officials explained how the Founding Fathers never intended to allow secession. "They enshrined in that document the right to change our national government through the power of the ballot—a right that generations of Americans have fought to secure for all," Jon Carson, then director of the Office of Public Engagement, wrote. "But they did not provide a right to walk away from it."

Yet, there's a substantial difference between California and Texas where secession's concerned. In Texas, getting an independence referendum for people to vote on requires a legislator putting it on the ballot. But in California, citizens can bypass having to work through lawmakers, and propose a referendum directly.

"This has never happened before, and California is uniquely positioned to do this," Yes California's Marcinelli told Mashable. "[Texans] don't have the ability to propose this referendum."

 

Didn't the Left tell us that Texas secession was treasonous and seditious?:

http://www.kvue.com/life/canadians-offer-to-let-the-west-coast-join-canada/353519870
Canadians offer to let the West Coast join Canada
Staff , KREM 3:42 PM. CST November 17, 2016


Canadians have had a fairly amusing presence in this year’s election. After a campaign to remind Americans they are great, now one Canadian reporter is inviting the West Coast to join our neighbors to the north.

“Dear California, Oregon, Washington – I’m sure we can work something out if you want to join Canada,” Chad Harris, a reporter from Kamloops, British Columbia, tweeted.

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Chad Harris [MENTION=57295]Chad[/MENTION]HarrisBC
Dear California, Oregon, Washington - I'm sure we can work something out if you want to join Canada. #ElectionNight
9:19 PM - 8 Nov 2016
79 79 Retweets 142 142 likes
Other Canadians tweeted back that they should also invite Hawaii.

The Seattle Times got in on the story, writing “Calicadia? With the three Pacific coast states voting overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton, there is talk of Washington, Oregon and California joining Canada.”

Even BuzzFeed picked up the story, though in their version emphasized California’s exit and barely mentioned Oregon and Washington also being invited to the party. In fact, there is a #CalExit hashtag trending in some circles.

Meanwhile, Canada sent the US 150 maple trees on Tuesday as a sign of friendship. They were delivered to the National Parks Service in Washington D.C.

(© 2016 KREM)

 

Well Democrats play by different rules. Do as I say, not as I do.

 

Why don't those in California move to Canada? Seems like that would be easier.

 

Could they handle the US armed forces marching in and occupying the State as the government arrests leaders of such a movement for High Treason this is settled we fought a Civil War to prevent Secession and now we are far better armed and equipped to handle this quickly and decisively at the armed forces and civilian Federal policing options.

 

I'm losing track, the Vermont independence movement during the Bush years was cute and funny but then the Texas secession movement was treasonous. Now with the Calexit it's cute and funny again. I wish the Left would make up its mind about secession!

 

Canada would almost immediately regret its decision to make California part of their country.

 

The outrage is soooo feigned! The electoral college is a sham, always has been, but the silent majority is fact. Eat it Libs.

 

Lol....see how generous their state is without all that money coming from Washington.

 

This is a piece from the leftist alternet.org site. Nonetheless there are some interesting ideas, such as the author daring right-wingers to secede and speculating that the Left may have erred in celebrating Lincoln's pursing victory over the south because not pursuing it would have left the north stronger and more likely to embrace progressive ideals. It's rather long, please read it all at the link:

http://www.alternet.org/election-20...cession-vision-principled-nation-states-where

ELECTION 2016
It Is Time to Consider Progressive Secession: A Vision of Principled Nation States Where Humanistic Values Predominate
Progressive minds should be open to the possibility of putting secession on the table of political options.
By G. Pascal Zachary / AlterNet November 18, 2016
1.8K196
The stunning defeat of Hillary Clinton this month provides a painful reminder of the size and scale, diversity and divisions, of the United States. Democratic candidate Clinton won the popular vote by close to 2 million votes, but she lost the Electoral College by a significant margin because of losing three, large, typically blue states by razor-thin margins. The entire West Coast of the U.S.—Washington, Oregon and California—voted for Clinton by a margin of more than 60 percent, but because regional blocs are meaningless by themselves in the American political system, the Left Coast gains no direct path toward influencing the new administration.

The American method of choosing presidents seems especially painful this month with the imminent inauguration of Donald Trump, a right-wing populist who appealed openly to base fears and prejudices. Trump’s opponents are strongest in the most dynamic, educated and cosmopolitan parts of the U.S. Yet these bastions of progressive values face four years of powerlessness, at least in the executive branch of government. One immediate fear is that President Trump will appoint far-right justices to the Supreme Court, killing progressive ideals and aspirations for a generation in the judicial branch, which supposedly serves as a vital check on presidential power.

Losing elections breeds blame and frustration. The Democratic Party’s candidate could have been more charismatic. Clinton’s corporate neoliberal reputation, and her decision to choose a pro-corporate moderate as her vice president rather than reaching out to a person of color or an economic populist in the mold of Bernie Sanders, seems a major misstep in retrospect. One response is to talk of tactical changes and the need to mount a “50 state campaign,” to quote Howard Dean, the former chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Nervous chatter about who might emerge as a compelling candidate to defeat Trump in 2020 has already begun.

Yet, the marginalization of progressive movements in the U.S. reflects the deeply conservative, even anti-democratic structure of the U.S. political system. After the surprise of Clinton’s defeat, and despite the vows of progressive U.S. senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren to fight President-elect Donald Trump at every turn, these barriers to democratic reform now seem insurmountable.

Perhaps predictably, in the dark days after Trump’s stunning victory, the emergence in California and Oregon of infant movements for these states to secede from the U.S. seem destined to wither and die quickly. Should these movements be dismissed as the siren songs of the desperate, panaceas for the perplexed? In this article, I aim to start a long-term conversation among progressives about the merits of secession, about the need to turn frustration into future visions of principled nation-states in which progressive humanistic values predominate.

To begin, we must rethink, reconceive and redefine the secessionist impulse. Secessionism is a political option long demonized by progressives, and much misunderstood. Secession, simply put, refers to the pursuit of revolutionary change through the breakup of the United States into smaller pieces. The impulse to secede need not be viewed as reactionary. Indeed, talk of a new kind of secession—progressive secession, or p-secession for short—might be one way of honoring Sanders’ call for continued “political revolution.”

In one p-secession scenario, California could become its own sovereign nation-state. Parts of Vermont or Washington state might join Canada. Or the South could secede again (as some right-wingers fantasize) in a replay of the political revolt that ignited the Civil War. Texas, briefly an independent republic in the 1840s, might reprise its experience of nationhood. In theory, the new pieces, or political units made by possible by secessionist movements, would better represent the aspirations of their people and more clearly reflect the generally accepted principle of self-determination.

Other than the staggering defeat to Trump, and the promise of right-wing control of the Supreme Court for a generation, why should progressives think more seriously about secession as an ideal? And how might a national conversation about p-secession help democratic reformers of all stripes—of both the progressive and the corporatist wing of the Democratic Party—to gain more leverage and bring more pressure against the new right-wing Republican ascendancy?

First, let’s step back and look again at the structural barriers that are strangling the voices of American political revolutionaries. First, the winner-take-all system of federal elections means that progressives and left-wing radicals have virtually no influence on national politics. Minority parties invariably die. Even progressive influence on the Democratic Party presidential candidates seems scant. The progressive path in healthcare reform, best illustrated by the single-payer approach, was actually opposed by President Obama in his first term. The president also dismissed progressive objections to his practice of personally selecting assassination targets around the world. President Obama also ignored progressive appeals to create a federal jobs program, nationalize large banks deemed too big to fail, and sharply increase taxes on the wealthy (rather than merely seek to “restore” the Bush II tax cuts).

In Europe and some other parts of the world, the parliamentary system allows small political parties of all persuasions, including the far right, to gain some influence at the national level. Parliamentary democracy has flaws, notably the lack of any direct election of party leaders who become heads of state. The system also promotes fragmentation and can produce its own kind of political gridlock, when governments of national unity form out of a country’s two chief rivals. But for progressives in America, parliamentary elections, at both national and state levels, would offer a rich bounty. The left would possess bargaining chips, and possibly in the formation of coalition governments, a seat at the table. However, to introduce parliamentary governance in the U.S. would require constitutional changes that seem highly unlikely, if not inconceivable. It seems easier to imagine the peaceful secession of progressive pieces of the U.S. than to divine how a national constitutional convention would revamp our political structure in ways most progressives deem progressive.

Traditionally, progressives have resigned themselves to their marginalized status by embracing the idea, espoused by Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis in a 1932 dissent, that the states are “laboratories of democracy.” The existence of state governments, Brandeis argued, meant that "a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country." Hence, the conventional wisdom has long been that progressives should seek to capture statehouses or at least win influence in state capitols and innovate at the state level, and then watch as progressive innovations are adopted nationally.

Increasingly, however, states are not laboratories of progressive innovation, but laboratories of conservative reaction. Legislation expanding so-called religious freedom and gun rights have swept through many states, illustrating how the far right incubates reactionary ideas at the subnational level. With the important though limited exceptions of gay rights and marijuana usage, whenever progressive solutions take root in individual states—and they do—they often become trapped in these states. In short, good progressive ideas don’t get adopted at the federal level. Witness the frosty reception given the New York state ban on the environmentally destructive practice of fracking, imposed in 2015. Rather than signaling a national ban on fracking, the New York ban remains an isolated success for progressives.

The trend is clear. “The problem is, just when we need their innovative energies, the states are looking less and less likely to be fountainheads of new federal policy over the next generation,” Aaron K. Chatterji, a former economic adviser to President Obama, wrote in 2015.


Perhaps the best recent example of how states aren’t any longer laboratories for democracy for the nation comes from California, the richest state by economic activity and largest by population. In 2014, California enacted a 1 percent surcharge on incomes over $1 million; the surcharge comes on top of progressive tax rates that rise from 9.3 percent on incomes above $260,000 to 12.3 percent on incomes above $520,000. Critics warned of a massive exodus of wealthy people, raising fears of super-talents fleeing Hollywood and Silicon Valley. That hasn’t happened. The wealthy have stayed and the state’s fiscal health and public services have greatly benefited from additional revenues.

Under Brandeis’ logic, Californian’s tax innovation should have taught national lawmakers that higher taxes on the wealthy are the quickest way to improve the fiscal health of the U.S. And despite popular support among California voters, the state’s large and powerful Democratic congressional delegation hasn’t pushed as a priority any similar federal tax increase on the nation’s wealthy. Now, with the election of Trump, the Republican-dominated Congress is expected to cut taxes on the wealthy! In short, despite the support of our nation’s largest, richest state for higher taxes on the wealthy, raising taxes on the wealthy across the U.S. appears politically impossible. So much for California’s influence on the nation.

The situation says much about why p-secession is worth exploring. The election of Trump dramatically shows that the U.S. is not fundamentally a progressive country with periodic lapses of reaction. Rather, the Trump victory demonstrates anew the brittleness, shallowness and bankruptcy of the influential view, first expressed by the late historian Eric F. Goldman in a 1952 book, that American reformers have a“rendezvous with destiny.” From the vantage point of 2016 and a Trump electoral victory, American reformers instead seem to have a date with the dung-heap of history. Under this alternate reading of American history, the nation is basically a profoundly conservative polity with occasional lapses of progressivism and reform.

The second stubborn reality about secession is that, historically, the impulse to break up the Union is synonymous with reactionary forces. Secessionists in the American past have been the slaveholder, the racist, the bigot and the violent extremist. Since the run-up to the Civil War and President Lincoln’s insistence that the American Union must be held together at any cost, promotion of secession has been viewed as fundamentally right-wing. After all, defenders of the South’s withdrawal from the U.S. were slaveholders bent on protecting the odious institution of human bondage. The cost of preserving the union, for progressives, was the bloodiest war in human history (up to that point). The Civil War, decisively won by the North, resulted in a U.S. national government that was (from the 1880s to the 1950s) insidiously controlled by the political heirs of the former secessionists. Southern politicians defiantly opposed social reforms and “massively resisted” racial equality at a cost in justice for all Americans that is often lost on enthusiasts of President Lincoln.

 

I cannot support this enough. Local autonomy is freedom, central government is tyranny.

Let the Californians have their man-horse marriages and prohibitions on drawings of guns.

 

A still before running process and issue ... same in several of the 50 states, so not new issue, but boosted after election!

By law not possible to secede, but you on both sides (left and right) fighting each other by throwing dirt as heavy as possible in this forum declare so often in matter of law things that law is not everything. And to secede as US state form the rest of the USA was done 1 time before and failed! Most Movies in cinemas have often a "part #2" later ... maybe here a new "greys vs. blues" as part #2?

EUR as currency and the CHIPS, LAPD, SFPD, the bunch of militias, re-enactors & Co. will protect the borders ... and looking to the huge Hispano part of population, Trump has to build his "Berlin Wall #2" then around California.

This will create many new jobs in the USA in construction business, but only help Wall Street if the jobs are cheap enough to be done by illegals and legal aliens to make enough profit at stock's are great at least!

 

LOL the Hispanics can't even keep Mexico safe what makes you think they would do such a bang up job in CA. As far as the legit law enforcement I doubt there was 1% that voted Democratic after hillary had BLM up on the stage for her at the convention. Also the libs in this thread seem to think all of California is one big liberal Disneyland. That may be true for the coastal areas but inland where the economy is based on agriculture not so much. This link does not reflect the 2016 election but as you can see even between 2008 and 2012 there was a significant shift toward conservatism

http://www.geocurrents.info/geopoli...lley-and-californias-political-transformation

 

Who are the harvesters in the interior of California?


Attention satire is also a component!

 

look at the link I provided, it is self explanatory

 

Not really ... this question who the urgently needed harvesters are is not really touched!

 

Who cares?

 

The farmers ... maybe ... because no cheap illegal harvester slaves on the correct side of the wall to Mexico to do the job?

 

Or they can buy equipment that can do the job.

 

If it exists for this and that sort of harvesting ... and is not too expensive!
But be aware that it is "Made in USA" really, otherwise they have to buy thing, which are cheap build by US companies in China etc. and what has killed many US jobs.
But hey ... maybe these jobless white and black US people can be the alternative harvesters working for 1.50 USD / hour?

 

California is basically being taken over by Mexico anyway so this move is somewhat redundant

 

Its only southern California that wants to leave. If you look at the county by county election results, over half of California is red....

 

I'd love it. I was the kid who cheered for Lex Luthor in the original Superman movie.

Don't get the door hit your backside on the way out!