(ThyBlackMan.com) As of 2018, the State of California contained the fifth largest economy on Earth. California is a state of 40 million official residents and a resident alien population of about 10 million. It maintains its own ocean ports and as a coastal state, it is not landlocked with the remainder of the continental United States. It’s border with Arizona and Nevada is vast and rough, both mountainous and desertous. It’s border with Oregon is also mountainous, but feels more like a continuation of Northern California until one reaches Central Oregon on Interstate 5 similar to how Reno, CA also flows into Reno, NV. The interstate interfaces are few and far between its enormous and geographically challenging features.
California is a state with a low return on its federal dollar investment and has typically been a donor state to the federal government until recently. That means that they received less money than they gave to the federal government in terms of return on investment. Californians have lost their ability to deduct their state taxes from their federal income tax returns and as such, have seen their federal taxable income increase by 9%. That means that as expensive as it is to live in California, Donald Trump’s recent tax modification has made it that much more expensive and made the return on investment in the federal dollar that much less in value. One can expect for California to end up on the donor state side of the ledger again once the 2019 data comes in.
Donald Trump has launched a cold Civil War on America’s Democratic lead states. He has essentially assessed a tax penalty on all of us who live in high tax states like Oregon, California, and New York. He has demonstrated that he is willing to disregard Puerto Rico as a territory in terms of disaster relief and has shown that he will continue to pander only to his base in America’s Republican lead states. This President brings so much uncertainty to America’s future that the idea of secession now has to be seriously considered, and one has a very difficult time understanding how the state that provides the United States with 70% of its fresh produce would be hurt by becoming an independent nation.
I realize that I am mentioning an act that lead to a Civil War in the past. I realize that I am hypothesizing the beginning of the end of our Union, but look around; our union is dissolving before our eyes and I am starting to believe that salvaging the best parts of this nation might just be the best thing that we can do in the face of Trumpism. I am not proposing that California secede. I am proposing that Californians better start thinking about it.
Californians are globally usurped in the political process. The Electoral College and the United States Senate are structured in such a way as to provide rural white states like Montana with disproportionate power over the more populated and certainly more melanated states like California. Since more Americans live in California than any other state in the union, Californians should have the most political power. It is counter-intuitive to the principle of “one person, one vote” to tilt the playing field in favor of the land-owner elite in the plain states. Koch Brothers anyone? Montana has one million people and the exact same amount of representation in the upper chamber of the Congress as California’s 40 million. This represents minority vote dilution. California possesses about 17 times more electoral college votes than Montana, but has 40 times more people. Again, vote dilution for minority voters.
How long will Californians allow themselves to be dominated this way? What is the benefit of belonging to the United States under the authoritarian grip of Trumpism? Why should they remain targets of the Republicans in the federal government? Why should they be a donor to the people in the South who despise them? What will be their tipping point and who will join them? Oregon? Washington? Why should the world’s fifth largest economy continue to tolerate a hostile nation which draws from its wealth while despising its values? What damage would losing the fifth largest economy on Earth do to Trump’s America?
I suppose that the rigged playing field that is the federal government will continue to lean to the Right side of the Overton Window; leaving left-leaning states with little to no choice but to consider leaving the union. California has witnessed Republicans steal an election from their will in Florida and watched the disproportionate power of the Electoral College usurp their expressed will again in 2016. Californians watched as the President that they duly elected was denied the right to nominate a Supreme Court Justice, while the President selected by the Electoral College has already been able to make two placements in as many years without much pushback. Californians are victims to concentrated disproportionate power via disproportionate representation.
I propose that the fundamental problem of the United States of America is its institutional racism and that the US Senate and the Electoral College are the institutional foundations of that racism. I believe that the Republican Party is the world’s largest white supremacist organization and should be labeled as a hate group at a minimum and a terrorist organization at the maximum. In my 47 years, I have seen nothing but racism and Southern Strategy from the GOP, and as the nation’s most prosperous and diverse state, California is directly in the GOP’s crosshairs as they continue to contort democracy to power. California is beginning to resemble South Africa in that regard. It was not a very visible issue when the state was majority white, but now that it is not, I fear that the methods of racial and economic control will only grow more extreme in the face of changing demographics and climate change induced human migration. California is a microcosm of the nation in this regard.
I am in no hurry to see the dissolution of the nation that I served. I am in no way hoping for it to crumble and perish, but I fear that it set itself on that path long ago when it established a pseudo-democratic constitutional republic based on slavery and genocide. At what point do we no longer want to be a part of that horrible heritage and at what point and by which means will we disassociate ourselves from our nation’s horrific foundation. That’s what the Confederate Monument strife is about. That’s what Trump’s wall is about. I wonder if one day, that’s what California’s secession will be about.
Staff Writer; Darrick Herndon
