Slashdot Mirror
'New California' Movement Wants To Create a 51st State (wqad.com)
PolygamousRanchKid, Ayano, and an anonymous reader all shared the same story. Tribune Media reports:
A group has launched a campaign to divide California into two states. It isn't the first attempt to split California, but unlike a failed campaign in 2016 to divide California into six states, the campaign to create New California would split the state into one made up of rural counties and another made up of coastal counties.
USA Today provides some context: Breaking up California remains no easy task: A formal secession means getting approval from both Congress and California's legislature itself. But that hasn't stopped folks from trying. Hundreds of times... Monday's declaration of "the State of New California" marked the latest in more than 200 long-shot efforts to split the Golden State. All so far have failed.
USA Today provides some context: Breaking up California remains no easy task: A formal secession means getting approval from both Congress and California's legislature itself. But that hasn't stopped folks from trying. Hundreds of times... Monday's declaration of "the State of New California" marked the latest in more than 200 long-shot efforts to split the Golden State. All so far have failed.
Splitting California's electoral votes is a right wing wet dream. Makes you wonder if it's the Koch family or the Mercers behind this push. Or some combination of billionaires and Russian foreign intelligence.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
All of these split-state movements make no sense as long as we're keeping Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa and the US Virgin Islands in territory hell. If anyone deserves statehood, it's these places, not some disgruntled counties in a long-established state.
That state has the most electoral votes and it is always a democratic state. If they split it into 6, they could probably get 2 of those new states to be republican states.
What horse crap. Can we do that with Florida too?
Oops - looks like the Fox News crowd just lost interest in "New California".
Honestly most of California has basically nothing at all in common with the coastal regions they want to separate from. I'm not sure how the electoral shakedown will break out, roughly 50/50 I'd guess.
Ferret
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
More like from a "goofy secessionism dept"
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Don't name it "New California," keep the name "California" and make the SF+LA part take the name "Commifornia."
The Russians aren't eligible to medal b/c of the Sochi doping scandal, but Trump has invited them to assist with our elections anyway.
Better idea: Split the US in two countries. The Red States and the Blue States. And build a wall between the two.
It is obvious that conservatives and liberals have two fundamentaly different and irreconcilable ways of seeing the world, two completely different and opposite cultures, and that their union will never be anything else but a neverending compromise between the two that satisfies noone and only breeds frustration, anger and hatred. The civil war never really ended, people just stopped killing each other. The US is simply living under a century old cease fire.
Let the two countries in one part their own ways amicably. This way the red states will be able to continue electing their beloved Donald Trumps and the blue states their Harvey Weinsteins, and everyone will be happy.
The major problem with the "rural" vs coastal concept is MONEY.
When you split a state, you don't just get to ignore the debt, it has to be split up and fairly. But the coastal part earns all the money, while the rural part of California has a bunch of wealthy people that hate high taxes.
If they split the state, the rural people will try to avoid their fair share of taxes, leaving them with not enough taxes to pay off their share of the debt.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
If we're going to do this then maybe we should trim the liberal parts of Texas off to create another state as well to keep things even. Otherwise a plan like this is just tilting the federal government to the Right.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
At the rate they are going, California will be declared in rebellion, split up by force, and it's government jailed. These declarations of independence by non-communist California are just getting in front of the parade.
captcha: resolves
The "New California" would be as overwhelmingly liberal/Democratic as the "old" one.
For one thing, those undocumented workers keep a lot of those family farms and shops in business.
This is like the secessionist movements in Europe and Texas and California.....Russian backed nonsense.
The right wing in the US and Europe has been infiltrated by Russian agents and is being used to sow political unrest so Russia, who has no freedoms, can take over dominance of the west.
The cali liberals are punishing everyone else in the state by not complying with the federal govt. Give the cali councils and officials an ultimatum, then forcibly remove them if they dont start towing the line. Splitting the state is not the answer. Anyone who doesn't want to be part of the U.S. is free to jump on a plane and leave.
Wait until the "conservatives" dreaming of another red state figure out that, along with the bathtub speed white trash, they get lots and lots of gasp brown people. At least then there would be two Senators in favor of legalizing meth.
Just let rural California separate from the nutty liberal cost and let the nutty liberal cost secede from the US. They nutty liberals were trying to secede because Trump got elected, and the rural parts want to be free of the nutty liberal coast but stay part of the US. Seems like a good compromise to me.
Paul Preston and Tom Reed are two cranks who have been at this game since the early 90s. If you go to their "movement's" website you will find that their various "regional committees" are almost completely made up of Paul Preston and Tom Reed. Their previous efforts consisted entirely of raising money.
The funny part of this story is that Russian bots were pushing the story on Twitter and Facebook that this "New California" officially seceded from the rest of the state. Scamsters selling swag quickly got in on the fun:
https://twitter.com/GrantJKidn...
State secession has long been a favorite trope of the Russian bots. I'm sure you remember this story about how they pushed for Texas to secede. Turns out their Facebook page was run by the "Internet Research Agency" run out of St Petersburg, Russia.
https://extranewsfeed.com/how-...
https://washingtonmonthly.com/...
No collusion...
http://www.businessinsider.com...
You are welcome on my lawn.
Think of all the 1-star patches that would have to be sent out to update all the US flags and all the problems that would cause. Many companies can't even apply OS patches and most people can't even patch drywall w/o problems. Flags will be messed up for *years*. They probably won't all get patched exactly the same way, and improperly patched flags would look funny and could even fly all wrong. As a sysadmin, and someone who sometime sews, I'm against this.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
"of rural counties and another made up of coastal counties."
If you take away the nice, coastal part, you're left with the shitty desert part. They could join Nevada or something. I'm for it.
RUSSIAN MEDALLING
Athletes from Russia were just as entitled to compete fairly in the 2002 Winter Olympics as ones from every other country, you fascist.
If you dig into the details of the current California budget and look at the cash flows for roads, schools, medical care, and a couple of other things, what you find is a huge amount of money transferred from the coastal areas that would be in one new state to the rural areas that would be in the other. This is not unusual; it happens in a lot of states. (I used to do that kind of study professionally.)
Split the way it's drawn, the rural need for subsidies would remain largely unchanged, but the burden to provide the money would fall solely on the few cities (San Jose, San Diego) and their suburbs that got stuck in the rural state. Given a choice after they see a draft budget, San Jose and San Diego are going to scream about being included in the rural state.
In 1819 the Massachusetts legislature voted to enable Maine to become an independent state. However is this would have changed the balance in the Senate between slave and free states, Congress wouldn't admit Maine without admitting an additional slave state, which is what you probably learned in school was called the "Missouri Compromise".
However ... since Republicans currently control Congress, a different limitation comes into play, From Article IV Section 3 Clause 1:
New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union; but no new States shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress.
Since California is an overwhelmingly Democratic state, it's highly unlikely that the legislature will consent to increasing Republican power in the US Senate.
TL;DR: It can be done, but it won't happen unless another, Democratic-leaning state is admitted (e.g. Puerto Rico).
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Gold bitches! I only want a nation on the gold standard again. Fiat is either the cause, or a symptom of corruption. But itâ(TM)s bad news nonetheless.
The different parts of California will have to learn to work together. There is zero chance of splitting up as long as Washington D.C. exists.
Since California was stolen from Mexico, let's just give the whole thing back where it rightly belongs.
it sounds like the major political parties boycotted the referendum because it was chock full of poison pills. Both parties were still in favor of statehood. They probably didn't think it was worth swallowing poison for something that had zero chance of making them a State. Your post though, makes it sound like the people of PR would reject Statehood given a chance. A lie by omission perhaps?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
DC CAN'T be a state - read the Constitution! There is a REASON it's ONLY 10 square miles - Article 1 Section 8.
it would also violate the District Clause of the U.S. Constitution.
There's just no chance, as long as the place you are seceding from has veto power. No politician voluntarily gives up power.
Within certain constraints, seceding should be a fundamental right. Some minimum size, sensible geographic contiguity, a super-majority, done. The place you're leaving doesn't get a say.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Azatlán?
This didn't work in 1996 either when Italy wanted to split. I was in Rome at the time and there were every branch of military and polizia everywhere you looked with machine guns in-tote. Termini was swamped as was the Vatican... with police and troops.
Good luck now that military aren't getting paid. haha dicks.
Just Nazis trying to give future Republicans a chance to win over and above the other cheating, like voter suppression
Not enough votes in Puerto Rico.
To do this, you will have to sunder Florida and Texas and Ohio and Virginia.
So, basically, you'd have the larger cities, tech valley, movie capitol on the west side of the state (the side with more money), and then the 'rural' counties on the east side of the state (that have less money)?
Hmm...yeah, I don't think that's a really good idea. You'd be better off with a north and south division, so the economics are more even.
Awk! Pieces of eight. Pieces of eight. Pieces of seven... ERROR: General Protection Fault. [Paroty Error.]
When they put this to a plebiscite last year, 97% of the people who voted were for statehood, albeit with a low turnout. Statehood was also the most popular choice in the 2012 referendum, although that was worded in what some felt was a confusing way.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Ripper: Mandrake?
Mandrake: Yes, Jack?
Ripper: Have you ever seen a Commie drink a glass of water?
Mandrake: Well, I can't say I have, Jack.
Ripper: Vodka, that's what they drink, isn't it? Never water?
Mandrake: Well, I-I believe that's what they drink, Jack, yes.
Ripper: On no account will a Commie ever drink water, and not without good reason.
Mandrake: Oh, eh, yes. I, uhm, can't quite see what you're getting at, Jack.
Ripper: Water, that's what I'm getting at, water. Mandrake, water is the source of all life. Seven-tenths of this Earth's surface is water. Why, do you realize that 70 percent of you is water?
Mandrake: Good Lord!
Ripper: And as human beings, you and I need fresh, pure water to replenish our precious bodily fluids.
Mandrake: Yes. (he begins to chuckle nervously)
Ripper: Are you beginning to understand?
Mandrake: Yes. (more laughter)
Ripper: Mandrake. Mandrake, have you never wondered why I drink only distilled water, or rainwater, and only pure-grain alcohol?
Mandrake: Well, it did occur to me, Jack, yes.
Ripper: Have you ever heard of a thing called fluoridation. Fluoridation of water?
Mandrake: Uh? Yes, I-I have heard of that, Jack, yes. Yes.
Ripper: Well, do you know what it is?
Mandrake: No, no I don't know what it is, no.
Ripper: Do you realize that fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous Communist plot we have ever had to face?
(Dr. Strangelove, 1964)
About this horse shit.
Every 5 or 6 years another try is made at splitting california. It's been going on for over 50 years. It's never come close to happening. It's never going to happen. Split into 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 how many ever it's all just a few people who want things their way and don't wanna play nice in the sandbox.
Being nice is hard for them, being reasonable is something they don't know how to do. Compromise is something that have never done. Arrogant people who can't stand that someone has a different opinion.
where the roads are broken and cracked, the schools run down and the police & fire departments hard to come by. The ones that can leave do and the jobs go with them.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The second right-wing billionaire plan in three months to gerrymander the entire state of California. But who can blame the right? Gerrymandering is the one thing they know, and can do well. Cracking and packing is a right-wing way of life.
Last time it was an attempt to create two new right-wing states. Both schemes use the same strategy of packing the majority of the population of California into one nearly completely blue state, creating one (or two) slightly red majority states, but with a wealthy deep blue urban center captured at its edge like a hostage to pay the bills.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
+1. Even Orange County voted for Hillary in 2016.
You dumb retard, other states bus their homeless to CA. Like NV does. Presumably, homeless also prefer coastal states as they won't freeze to death in the winter.
So go back to your mom's tit you dumbshit.
Retard, just because you have budget envy, doesn't mean CA is in the red. Even after they subsidize your red state libertarian paradise.
New California would quite easily be able to fund itself by selling water to Old California. Being able to cut off Old California when they get out of line would be really entertaining.
By nature, San Fernando valley is a desert. It has been turned into a productive agricultural area by:
1) taping into underground aquifers (which are running dry)
and
2) taping into water supplies from northern California, and from other states.
If CA became it's own country, or if northern CA split from southern CA, the agreements that allow all of this water to San Fernando, might have to be renegotiated. And it is doubtful that S. CA would get the favourable terms they got a century ago.
San Fernando could find itself desperately short of water - sooner rather than later.
And the next step is a water war between the old and new California.
Blue Stater:tired of subsidy of the backwards Red States. Can I secede too
waste of time. Article 4 Section 3 of the constitution says it takes both the authorization of Congress and the state legislature(s) (plural if a new state is to be formed by parts of two or more states). There's no way something like this is making it through at the state level much less through Congress too. The vast majority of people aren't interested in forming new states from old states--all this really is is a way to push political buttons and rally certain ideological groups.
Maybe NorCal and SoCal make sense, but not coastal vs inland. What a horrible, unreflective divide that would be,
..........FULL STOP.
South Oregon? West Nevada?
If a Russian name is wanted try someone from the Russian/American Revolutionary War time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
The rural areas are the biggest consumers of welfare, etc. They literally cannot sustain themselves; they rely on state taxes.
I for one support this initiative. States should be city states. The "rural" cesspool should be stateless, etc. Let them survive in their own way off the govt tit like they want.
Many well known libs were ready to leave the country as well but that didn't happen. Would have been GREAT but sadly didn't happen.
Will keep wishing. :)
But the most rational splits would be somewhere south of monterey/north of LA, the central valley band from the pacific to nevada, and most of northern california as a third state. I haven't seen the split proposals for this '6 state solution', but splitting off the coast, mountain ranges, and the mojave all would make sense from geographical and cultural perspectives. California is essentially a country to itself, and while there is a lot of shared culture, parts of california have more in common with Hawaii, or Arizona, or Oregon, or Mexico, than they do with the other parts of the state. Holding onto these already arbitrarily defined state borders as symbolic entities is really not helping the efforts for just and reasonably local representation of the people's needs.
In regards to Brown: While I think he was probably the best solution available, more scrutiny should be giving to some of his real estate related deals or political pushes, as well as some of the other really dumb plans pushed like those tunnels to funnel water to San Franciso. Two of the biggest problems currently facing California are water related, and they are called Los Angeles and San Francisco. Rather than funneling all the water there and harming both the regional water tables as well as straining the Resevoir supplies, they really need to be pressured to use local funding to build up their own sea based infrastructure and charge locals water prices accordingly, so that water from the rest of the state can be redistributed to actual local needs, ideally reducing farming reliance on wells, which could help begin the process of healing the rapidly dwindling water table supply and the resulting raises in land height across the valleys and mountains.
to get two more Republican Senators. What we need is make the Senate proportional to the population. Not need to continue the current archaic system.
"While we have far more protections for small voter blocks" I would argue with the electoral college, that you went a step too far, and that at least for the current set up of presidential election, you have a tyranny of the minority. In most place of the world where a president is decided by election , 1 person is 1 vote. But with your electoral college, this is not true and small state people count for more than big state. In fact I can't think of any other democracy where that happens. The result is actually that the minority can decide election against popular vote. And that's royally screwed from a democratic point of view IMO.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
During the civil war West Virginia was removed from Virginia and made a separate state. The Constitution didn't matter. Lincoln could either save constitutional government or the union and he choose to save the union. Technically, the suspension of civil rights during the civil war was based on marshall law during an insurrection. That has never been revoked.
Having said "the southern states are still in the union" the federal government was faced with a problem. The 1866 election, based on the 1864 election results, with the southern states now voting, would have led to a Democratic victory. That would have overturned the verdict of the bloodiest war in our nation's history. The Republicans, understandably were not going to let that happen. Thus what we usually call "reconstruction" which was only ended when the 1980 census limited the likelyhood of a Democratic victory. The north with the aid of huge immigrant flows, had now won the war, and got to write the history books.
In any case, West Virginia was removed from Virginia without the concurrence of the state of Virginia in direct violation of the constitution but the post civil war era was also the post constitutional era.
Puerto Rico 43.5%
Northern Mariana Islands 52.3%
American Samoa 57.8%
All are much higher than California.
Debt is how much you owe. Deficit is how much you owe this year. It's easy to wipe out a deficit short-term. The tricky part is doing it in ways which work long-term. Simply raising taxes leads to long-term economic slowdown, which reduces tax revenue, meaning you didn't really reduce the deficit, you just shifted it into future years. The net result being long-term increase in debt.
Simply considering only deficit also ignores the value of long-term investments (e.g. infrastructure like roads). A state which spends money fixing up roads spikes their deficit one year, but reduces it for 20-50 years in the future (duration depends on how competent a repair job they did). Likewise, a state which simply stops repairing infrastructure to reduce the deficit for a year is setting itself up for long-term pain in a way which doesn't show up in a simple debt/deficit analysis.
tl;dr - How well a state is managing its budget is a lot more complicated than a simple deficit analysis. Here are several ways to analyze it.
One for the rich, one for the poor!
This might be a way to bring in Puerto Rico, which would bring us to 52 states and also restore the balance of red vs blue states.
Who said they were states? You didn't say California was the state most in poverty. You claimed (lied actually) that California had the highest poverty in the nation. Those places are part of your nation.
Why would it offend anyone? People enjoy pointing out you constant errors and lies.
Almost 500 comments bashing California
Stay classy /. snowflakes
The area that is considering this lacks energy proguction, agricultural resources and water. USA will get payback for 5 decades of 9th circus court. Plus the reverse immigrationmof tech and entertainment will leave the 51 state a coastal desert. No downside here. Go for it!
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - Arthur C. Clarke
Like the Calexit movement that was started by a guy who lived in Russia, this probably has ties to Russia too as well as the Republicans. If California is split up then Texas and Alaska should also be split up. Populated cities like Houston would be split up from Rural Texas counties just like this California split.
As if the GOP gerrymandering machine hasn't gone far enough.
You have to be smarter than the machine you're working with.
Mmm, I meant that the swap, California's 54 EC votes for PR's 4
Looks like they want to break off the wealthy beachfront areas in the state from the agrarian rest of the state.
Think of it as the haves and the have-nots
Ken
Article four reads in part ...."but no new state shall be formed or erected within the jurisdiction of any other state ....without the consent of the legislatures of the states concerned as well as the congress."
I give it a snowballs chance in hell of becoming a reality. First of all it would double the number of Senators from California which no other state would want and the above is a pretty high hurdle..
It's always the same in debates about the rural/urban divide, and the rural populations' desire to not be dominated electorally by urban mindsets.
Inevitably people harp on the fact that rural areas are poorer, receive a disproportionate amount of benefit from being tied at the hip to urban economies, etc.
What one needs to understand about most rural people- we don't care. The money isn't as important as self-direction and self-reliance.
We would rather have gravel/chip-seal roads, more modest school programs, and revert law enforcement to bare minimums- if, having those things meant we didn't have to live under the thumb of urban notions of 'what's best for us'.
No-one wants to be told 'you don't know what's best for you, but I do, and you're going to get it whether you like it or not'.
And rural people hear that more than any other group.
From the US point of view, there was no Virginia legislature. At that point, it wasn't a state in the US. There was, however, this area that wanted to be a state, and its people would vote for it.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Urban California has a growing population. It will divert water from agriculture to support its increasing population. "New California" is an attempt by the agricultural counties to prevent that change.
No point telling him what his own link says, he'll just go on denying it anyway.
It's some kind of badge of honour for him to remain wilfully ignorant.