Will the US Disintergrate?
Politics / US Politics Oct 15, 2012 - 02:46 AM GMTBy: LewRockwell
Jack D. Douglas writes: An essay by Simon Black, sent to me by Wes Drawdy down in South Carolina, is a very good overview from the ground up of what's happening in the Spanish Financial Crisis and is very similar to what is already happening in Greece, Italy and Portugal and will likely soon be happening in France and northward. He emphasizes the "capital flight" he could see all around him, people rushing to get their money out of the Spanish banks before emergency laws impose severe restrictions on withdrawals, as has already begun in less drastic ways in Italy, and getting it out of Spain, especially to nearby Andora. The financial Media are covering this, but they are emphasizing the banks' massive borrowing to the de facto insolvent Spanish government, which makes the banks de facto insolvent, while all officials are pretending this is not yet at the critical level which could produce a full scale banking panic any day. The Media also do not catch the sense of growing panic among the people in general, as Black does.
Black does not mention that the banking crisis involves the regional banks, not just a few Big Banks. He does not mention that the natives are beginning to revolt. The richest, industrial province of Catalonia is planning to hold a referendum on secession because the central government is taxing them severely to help faster sinking provinces, pushing Catalonia into ever deeper debts it cannot pay. Roughly 75% of the people in Catalonia tell pollsters they want a referendum on secession. Just yesterday the federal government moved to take more direct control over Catalan education to Hispanicize the people more, which was already a major reason the people want to go free. A few other provinces are rumbling and seem to be moving in the same direction.
My life long friend Bill Marina was Anglo-Hispanic-Cuban. His father and his family were Spanish-Cubans who moved to Cuba early in the last century. The family was not from Catalonia, but we paid attention to Catalonia because they have been so important in Spain and retained much of Catalan culture and nationalism. I used to remind Bill that Catalonia would likely rise again some day by simply saying, "Viva Catalonia!," to which he merely smiled. I think we were right. I've long thought the same of my ancestral nation of Scotland and thought it absurd for such a fine nation dedicated to education, intellectual life, science, and Adam Smith should be tied to London, though I've also thought it would be nice to take Cambridge and Oxford and some other good schools along with them when they break free.
The societies that have already been decentralizing and disintegrating faster and faster, such as the .K, will very likely disintegrate into their more tightly, culturally knit local, provincial societies, especially along the ancient lines of earlier nations. The Irish are already free, Wales and Scotland have been growing in power with "devolution" of power from the UK, and now Scotland is becoming more nationalistic. I expect Italy will likely break up in part, at least losing the Northern League nations.
The U.S. has been fighting cultural wars along largely regional lines for decades and these are now rapidly intensifying under the strains of the Great US-Global Crisis. The N.E. obviously is a largely foreign nation to the vast majority of us Americans and we are now more and more angry over The System and foreign policies they support and we pay for and suffer from. There are other huge fault lines among the regions of America, but none are as deep and wide as those separating the N.E. Nation from the rest of us. I went to major colleges and taught in some in the NE (Harvard, Princeton, Hopkins, Dartmouth, Wellesley, Syracuse) for many years of my young adulthood and there are many things I love about it, especially New England, but I have lived most of my life in other regions of the U.S. and am very aware from the ground level that the NE in general (excluding New Hampshire) is a largely separate nation.
The Big New York Banks and Big Media and Gargantuan DC now make me feel that more than ever. The South and other cultural nations are not yet ready to rise again, but a catastrophic implosion produced by the insanities of the NE, mostly DC, will change that drastically. If so, I think Southern Blacks, who have been returning home from the NE, Middle West, and West, will join in singing "Dixie" and that will finally end the awful, fatal fault line of the earlier Southern American nation.
Jack D. Douglas [send him mail] is a retired professor of sociology from the University of California at San Diego. He has published widely on all major aspects of human beings, most notably The Myth of the Welfare State.© 2012 Copyright Jack D. Douglas / LewRockwell.com - All Rights Reserved
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