US Civil War II
WSJ has a short piece on Igor Panarin’s recently reiterated 1976 prediction that the US will break up into six republics.
He based the forecast on classified data supplied to him by FAPSI analysts, he says. He predicts that economic, financial and demographic trends will provoke a political and social crisis in the U.S. When the going gets tough, he says, wealthier states will withhold funds from the federal government and effectively secede from the union. Social unrest up to and including a civil war will follow. The U.S. will then split along ethnic lines, and foreign powers will move in….
[Panarin] called U.S. foreign debt “a pyramid scheme,” and predicted China and Russia would usurp Washington’s role as a global financial regulator.
This seed of an idea in combination with Krugman’s column today on fifty Hoovers suggests that political unrest will increase as states rein in spending to meet unfunded federal mandates and the legal obligation to balance their budgets. The resentment will be targeted at the federal government, which has no obligation to balance the budget and has borrowed increasingly on the global market with promises of a future payoff, the pyramid scheme. State politicians will buckle to the pressure of those angered by their financial support of a government that has abandoned their wellbeing to stop supporting that government. For some the objection could be to redistributing their taxes to “undeserving” residents of other states who sponge off the government. To others, it might be that the “undeserving” are Washington’s Wall Street cronies. Socioeconomic faultlines in the nation will lead to a realignment of loyalties along the lines of foreign trading partners and economic zone, or Red and Blue, or sports teams. That would give new meaning to being a Yankee.
Find your future home here:
This map doesn’t look right to me… Any future for Oregon and Washington would be more closely bound with British Columbia than with California and Arizona. I could see California wanting to secure the resources of the Pacific Northwest (especially access to water), but there would always be a strong secessionist resistance from the North.
The sphere of influence for Texas also looks way too small. Wouldn’t you think it would pull Kansas more than Canada could? Wouldn’t Kentucky and Tennessee lean more toward Texas than New York?
And you’d think that the Rocky Mountain states would be more inclined westward than northward.
That said, California has a large Asian population and very tight trading relations across the Pacific. And they’re probably a little too liberal join with the central north states, which may actually explain the Rocky Mountain split.