It is completely beyond me why the people of this country/Empire haven’t taken to the streets and marched on the political castles with torches, pikes, clubs, and muskets like good townsfolk used to do.

Just look at the utter incompetence, not to mention skullduggery, of what they’re doing in Washington.  It is a government incapable of … well, governing.  

Take “health care.”  In half a year, they have managed to accomplish nothing.  And what they have fussed about so bunglingly didn’t even attempt to address the basic problems with a system that is by far the most expensive in the world, providing care that ranks 37th.  Instead, they tried to create an insurance scheme that actually would force individuals to buy it or pay stiff penalties – an intrusion of government into citizens’ lives even worse than the military draft – with “care” defined by earmarks selected by medical and pharmaceutical lobbyists.  As of now (New Year’s 2010) it looks as if it will never pass.

Take global warming.  They cobbled together a cap-and-trade scheme that they admitted would place a heavy energy cost on every household, but what they didn’t acknowledge was that it would create a system just like the one in Europe that has been a complete failure.  Nor did they admit that it would principally benefit the energy traders themselves, including those like Al Gore who set up trading outfits to get the windfall.  Luckily, it looks at this point as if it won’t even pass.

Take Afghanistan.  Here the U.S. Congress had nothing to say, abdicating its Constitutional responsibility to “raise and support Armies,” and the White House had nothing to do because it had no good options.  Popular opinion strongly believed, and all the facts available demanded, that the U.S. should pull out as quickly as possible and leave a corrupt and unsustainable state to its own devices. But no, the big fool said to push on.

What should be obvious is that it is impossible to govern a nation of 300 million people covering four-million square miles.  

Simple as that.  

It doesn’t work, and hasn’t for quite some time.

Let’s look at a few of the more recent highlights of inability.

>The failed elections of 2000 and 2004 – failed, first, because of the mediocrity of the candidates offered; second, by inability of most parts of the country (not only Florida and Ohio) to know how to register and count votes, thanks in no small measure to congressionally mandated and corporate-owned electronic voting machines.

>The complete failure to know how to fight a war in Iraq, at a cost of millions of lives, a shattered society (which we have spent $52 billion in five years to reconstruct, wasted on shoddy building and unshoddy corruption), and a collapsed international reputation.  Nor Afghanistan, which represents eight years of bumbling.  The U.S. government, however, has succeeded in fueling Arab terrorism around the world at an increasing level.

>Blindful unwillingness to do anything about the enormous debts and deficits the nation/Empire is running up, including the inability to do anything about the looming failure of entitlement funds, especially Medicare and Social Security.  What does it say when the United States is $80 trillion in hock to China?

>Katrina. Remember?

>Dithering in the Middle East, while supplying economic and military support to an Israel that continues its hegemonic and disruptive policies against Palestine, and sitting by while both sides commit war crimes.  Yet that support gets the U.S. no closer to any “peace” talks, while inflaming Arab opinion against the U.S. and keeping jihadism alive.

>No Child Left Behind.  Real ID. National Animal Identification System.  The U.S.A. PATRIOT Act.

>A government-sponsored mortgage crisis, beginning with Clinton policies in the 1990s to recklessly expand home ownership, blown into a full-scale disaster by banks and hedge funds deliberately allowed to be unregulated, and by a Federal Reserve in the grip of Ayn Randism similarly uncontrolled.

>A multi-trillion-dollar bailout (with taxpayer money) of the very banks and funds that caused that calamity, certain to lead to inflation, without any provision that the money be spent to increase lending and secure the economy instead of million-dollar bonuses.  Or create more jobs.  Hence the economy remains fragile and the rich get richer.

>Campaign financing a disgraceful joke, made only worse by the various federal schemes to oversee and reform it, until the open buying of congressional and presidential candidates by corporate and financial interests becomes one of those scandals so egregious that no one wants to talk about because it is at the heart of the political system.

>Unregulated legal and illegal immigration.

>Out-of-control federal spending, particularly on military overstretch (including weapons even DOD doesn’t want), space boondoggles, and ruinous agricultural subsidies, in the form of pork bills and earmarks that are the hallmark of a system so thoroughly corrupt it is no longer remediable.

Need I go on?  You get the point – and you’ve probably also got your favorite that I’ve overlooked. Pick up a paper, any day, any page, and you’re likely to find another example of the utter inability of this nation not only to solve but, let’s face it, even to understand its problems.

Given all this, the rumblings and grumblings of the tea-party people and the state-sovereignty movement make a certain sense. But they don’t really have any idea how deep the problems go.  They still think that, if they get conservatives into federal offices and some Tenth Amendment patriots into the state houses, that reform is possible.  What a risible idea.  The system at this size and complexity is entrenched, and protected by the corporate-political dyad that is its beneficiary, and it will not be reformed.

So why don’t the people rise up against it and do away with it?

Follow the logic of their tea-party suspicions and decide that the federal government simply shouldn’t decide what to spend on what – that should be in the hands of independent states.  Follow the logic of state sovereignty and make the states sovereign once again.

Why doesn’t nonviolent secession immediately rise up in the minds of these angry citizens as the obvious and easiest answer?  If changes are to be made, they must be made on a smaller scale, with less corporate corruption, and with at least some chance of citizens participating in the decisions that affect their lives.  That means secession.  If budgets are to be properly financed and spent, they must be in the hands of the people most directly affected, who can understand the costs and benefits on the ground.  That means secession.

And here’s the best part.  The townsfolk don’t even have to march on the castle with pike and musket.  That would run a risk of provoking the baron to the kind of overreaction people in power tend to make – and given the thoroughly militaristic nature of the barons of the federal government, a risk of such things as force being used and detention camps being set up and martial law being declared.

So instead of marching on the castles, ignore them.  We don’t want you; you don’t govern us any more; you won’t have any more control over our lives.  We’re going our own way.  No harm will come to you unless you interfere, but we want our own town our own way.  Secession.  Peaceful secession.    

Given the disgraceful scene before our eyes, with evidence mounting daily of a government unable to govern, that sort of conclusion is certain to occur to more and more people.  It is our task to lead them – carefully but surely – to the contemplation of independence and the wisdom of secession.