US Post Election Politics: 20 States Petition to Secede

In the Philippines, accusations of cheating typically marks the post-election political environment.

In the US, the recently concluded presidential and national elections has prompted malcontents from 20 states to petitioned the White House to secede.

From the BBC,

More than 100,000 Americans have petitioned the White House to allow their states to secede from the US, after President Barack Obama's re-election.

The appeals were filed on the White House's We the People website.

Most of the 20 states with petitions voted for Republican Mitt Romney.

The US constitution contains no clause allowing states to leave the union. By Monday night the White House had not responded.

In total, more than 20 petitions have been filed. One for Texas has reached the 25,000-signature threshold at which the White House promises a response.

'Blatant abuses'

The last time states officially seceded, the US Civil War followed.

Most of the petitions merely quote the opening line of America's Declaration of Independence from Britain, in which America's founders stated their right to "dissolve the political bands" and form a new nation.

Currently, the most popular petition is from Texas, which voted for Mr Romney by some 15 percentage points more than it did for the Democratic incumbent.

The text complains of "blatant abuses" of Americans' rights

Growing secession movements in the US and in Europe are symptoms of snowballing forces of decentralization, or the paradigm shift to localize and diversify power which have been gnawing at the architectural foundations of the 20th century political establishments.

Yet secession movements could turn out to be bloody as governments typically tend to resist or counteract the prospects of yielding territorial and taxation privileges by the suppression of political dissident by force.

Nevertheless secession movements are signs of grassroots opposition to centralized political power.

As Austrian economics Professor Thomas DiLorenzo duly notes,

Government will never be limited unless the citizens take matters into their own hands by resurrecting the states’ rights mechanisms of nullification, interposition, and secession.