Business community view of Confederate Monuments

This is a link to a Bloomberg article, "Alabama Won't Quit the Confederacy."

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-06-15/alabama-won-t-quit-the-confederacy

The subtitle is, "A state law preservers old monuments, the trace elements of treason and tyranny."

The article explains the law's workings. It is very critical of the state. These are some quotes.

Alabama markets its racial crucible, but still can't bear to get beyond it. In 2004 Lee Warner, then executive director of the Alabama Historical Commission, resigned from the commission, complaining that other members were less than eager to memorialize the civil-rights struggle.

And:

Meantime, black children continue to move through abysmally underachieving high schools named for Davis and Lee. Like Mississippi, Alabama continues to observe a combined state holiday jointly honoring King and Lee, a slave owner who fought to maintain totalitarian tyranny over black people. It's an occasion both to begrudge King's achievements, and to thwart them.

If white supremacy in America refuses to die, it's in part because too many white politicians insist on filling its decaying lungs with breath. The Memorial Preservation Act is only the latest attempt to resuscitate the corpse.

There are many articles critical of Confederate monuments and this article is a good article doing that. What makes it very significant is that it is in a prominent business publication and it sends a message to the business community that Alabama is retrograde on Civil Rights. Not a good place to locate a facility which will require hiring professionals with various specialized skills.

The Nation has an article about the farce of Republican legislators using various pretexts to keep Confederate monuments. https://www.thenation.com/article/republican-legislators-want-you-to-think-confederate-monuments-arent-political/

The Bloomberg article doesn't pull punches. This is the comment of the author.

That the law's proponents were too cowardly to admit what they were doing -- they just love old stuff -- might be considered incremental progress. But as Landrieu acknowledged, there is no decent way to compromise with the Confederacy. The statues and school names, trace elements of tyranny and treason, must go.

Across the political spectrum, excluding right-wing cranky, there is support for Confederate monuments to go.

It is my intention of keeping a registrar of who votes for the retention of Confederate monuments. If the Republican Party is the party of the Confederacy they should know that it will be documented and it is and it will be their public image.

The reactionary idiocy of California secession/ Need for the government to have a counter strategy

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-12-07/how-to-make-california-great-secede-with-a-little-help-from-putin

The link above is to an article in Bloomberg about the California secessionists getting help from Putin and working with a reactionary group there.

This is also a good example on how some ideas that are put forth as left are really reactionary.

The head of the group, Louis Marinelli, lives in Russia teaching English.

The fundamental measure of support for democracy is the willingness to accept defeat at the polls. You really aren't a believer in democracy if you can't having lost an election. I don't mean that you can't be vocal in expression dissatisfaction with the results.

When an election is run and the results come in there will most often be an uneven distribution of results across the geography of the political unit. In one part of a political unit your faction or party or program will likely have majority support. Breaking up the political unit isn't the solution. Such a plan of secession taken to its logical conclusion results in a republic of a city block or a farm.

According to the article the Russians are working with far-left parties as well as extreme right groups to undermine European states and evidently this program is now extending to California. There is a position paper on Russian support for far-left European parties online by Political Capitol in Hungary. I don't know anything about them, but this is the link in the Bloomberg article.

http://www.statecraft.org.uk/sites/default/files/documents/Peter%20Kreko%20Far%20Left%20definitive.pdf

The secessionists might consider that not everyone will want boundaries and divisions in North America and to divide the continent into many small states that will inevitably quarrel.  One of the great thing about North America is that most of the land mass is divided among three states, Canada, United States of America, and Mexico, and three states on relatively good terms, at least compared to some other areas of the globe.

I  think a lot of the media reporting portrays secessionists in the United States as some type of amusing novelty and doesn't take it seriously. I don't think the United States government is doing anything at all to think of counter strategies.  They should.

A counter strategy should NOT be to oppress secessionists by arresting them or some other act of official oppression. What needs to be done is formulate a strategy that utilizes a theoretical understanding of nationalism and what drives separatism and using that knowledge devise counter strategies.

For example Cinco de Mayo is about Hispanics in California supporting the Union against the Confederacy, which is both anti-secessionist and also a national narrative. The major Hispanic holiday in the United States is about Hispanic Californians defending the American nation against secession.  I don't think the story of the origins of Cinco de Mayo is generally known, it should be as a first step against California secession to make sure that it is more generally known.

In opposing Daniel Miller's program of Texas secession I think it would be relatively easy to show it is really a movement basing itself on a white nationalist history of Texas and negates the African American and Hispanic experience in Texas.

For Southern nationalism I suggest that it ought to be considered where the dividing line is between "Southern Studies" and southern nationalism is. In fact it could be asked whether there is really a boundary at all, and if Southern Studies isn't really the venue  of a Southern nationalist intelligentsia.

Also, an examination of the constructedness of the "South" should be done. John Shelton Reed in an article written under a pseudonym, J.R. Vanover, in Southern Partisan, was denouncing the term Southeastern because it was a term that people were using and he saw it as inimical to Southern nationalism. I think the antidote to Southern nationalism is a program of real regional studies and let states in the southern part of the Unites States out of the prison house of the Confederacy and southern nationalism.

These are just initial ideas I have to oppose separatism in America. I think a small group of academics could probably over a year come up with a fairly good program what would put a stop to various secessionist movements.