‘Calexit’ wants to give half of California to Native Americans

A group campaigning for Californian independence now wants to give away half the state to make an ‘autonomous Native American nation’.

The long-running ‘Calexit’ effort was given the green light to collect the 365,880 signatures needed to get secession on the state’s ballot in November.

Handing over all the federal land in California – the entire eastern half of the state from the Mexico border to Oregon – will likely make that a tougher sell.

Yes California co-founder Louis J Marinelli said the plan went further than any attempt in history to make up for the historical treatment of Native Americans. …

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Calexit gets go-ahead to start collecting signatures

Californias-state-flagAdvocates who want California to secede from the rest of the United States were given the green light Monday to begin collecting signatures for their initiative.

California’s Secretary of State Alex Padilla announced the ballot proposal had been cleared.

The latest measure would ask voters in 2020 to decide whether to open up a secession discussion. If passed, a second election would be held a year later asking voters to affirm the decision and become an independent country.

Advocates have until mid-October to gather 365,880 signatures of registered voters to get it on the ballot.

Marcus Ruiz Evans and Louis J. Marinelli, co-founders of the group Yes California, said the second vote would show that Californians are serious about secession and would strengthen the case for foreign governments to recognize the state’s independence.

“We realize it may seem like a long time to wait,” Marinelli told The Times of San Diego. “But we need time to have a serious dialogue with the people of California about why they should support the independence referendum by voting yes. The voters need to make an informed decision when they go to the polls to determine California’s political future.”

Evans told CNBC that while his group is progressive, they do embrace some conservative ideals.

“Calexit is left — we are progressive, and that’s why we don’t like Trump,” Evans said. “But there are some very hardcore Republican concepts to Calexit, including the group saying don’t waste our tax money.”

Evans says his group’s membership has grown four times its size since President Trump took office. There are about 44,000 current members.

There have been multiple efforts in the past for California to break away from the rest of America. They have either been withdrawn or failed to gather the signatures required to advance.

As the Yes California group gears up, another initiative to break up California into three separate states is also taking shape. That plan, backed by Silicon Valley billionaire Tim Draper, would create a northern California state with San Francisco at its core, another state near Los Angeles and a third that covers the Central Valley as well as San Diego.

And if that were not enough, there’s yet another proposal in play known as “New California” that would cut out rural counties and make them into individual states.

The founders of New California describe the rest of California as “ungovernable.”

“The current state of California has become governed by a tyranny,” the group declared in an online statement.

This article was originally published by Fox News

California secession leader abandons movement and moves to Russia

yes-california-russiaOne of the groups pushing for a California secession is abandoning their effort and the man who was leading the charge has moved to Russia.

Louis Marinelli, president of the Yes California Independence Campaign, announced the news in an official farewell statement last week.

“While Washington refused to act and the Americans continued to spew their hatred towards immigrants, Sacramento actively worked to protect our immigrants,” he said. “It was this contrast which motivated me to start this campaign for independence.”

The movement was always seen as a long-shot effort, but it highlighted the way in which many Californians have tried to distance themselves from Washington in the age of Trump.

The measure would have needed to get 585,407 valid signatures by July to qualify for the ballot in 2018.

“I have found in Russia a new happiness, a life without the albatross of frustration and resentment towards ones’ homeland, and a future detached from the partisan divisions and animosity that has thus far engulfed my entire adult life,” Marinelli added.

Furthermore, multiple donors pulled out of the effort due to fears of being tied to Putin, complicating a path forward for the movement.

“People got scared,” Ruiz Evans, vice president of Yes California told the Sacramento Bee. “They got spooked by what they saw on the news and pulled out.”

There were also constitutional hurdles, as a secession would have needed an amendment to the Constitution, meaning there would need to be approval by two-thirds of Congress and three-quarters of the state legislatures.

But still, Ruiz says he’s not giving up and plans to file a new “Calexit” proposal by May 1 in association with a new group called the California Freedom Coalition.

This piece was originally published by CalWatchdog.com

Russia’s Role in CA Secession Movement

yes-california-russiaThe campaign to place California secession on the ballot next election year entered uncertain waters as news broke that its mastermind lives and works in a city in the center of Russia.

“I immigrated to California, and I consider myself to be a Californian,” Louis Marinelli told The California Report from his Yekaterinburg apartment, KQED reported. “I wanted to handle some personal issues in my family, regarding immigration. My wife is from Russia. I’m here handling various personal issues. But at the same time, we have some political goals we can achieve while I’m here.”

From founding to funding

Marinelli’s deep Russian ties, past and present, attracted attention as he took his current stay in the country as an opportunity to start work on a so-called “embassy of California” in Moscow. That undertaking, as Bloomberg noted, has the aid of “a vehemently anti-American group supported by the Kremlin” — the Anti-Globalist Movement of Russia — which Marinelli said supports California’s right to self-determination. “Talking to the Russian tabloid Life, Alexander Ionov, the president of the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia, said that the embassy would serve as a hub to boost tourism and foster cultural and economic exchanges between the Golden State and Russia,” Heat Street reported.

“We may disagree on several issues, but if we have common ground on one issue, why shouldn’t we have a dialogue?” Marinelli asked Bloomberg. But he has already begun to hit against the limits of that rhetoric.

“Marinelli’s Russian connection has created a schism, if not quite the Great Schism, in the breakaway movement with members of the California National Party, a group that is formally affiliated with Yes California but has publicly disavowed Marinelli as a Russian marionette. Silicon Valley investor and Hyperloop co-founder Shervin Pishevar briefly became another standard-bearer of ‘Calexit,’ as it come to be known, threatening Marinelli’s virtual monopoly on the cause, but backed off, saying he didn’t really support secession.”

The Trump factor

But crisis management was not the only reason Yes California accelerated its timetable to land their initiative on the California ballot in 2018. (According to the prospective measure’s language, voting yes “would trigger a special election the following March in which residents would decide if ‘California should become a free, sovereign and independent country,’” as the San Jose Mercury News observed.) Donald Trump’s election provoked a degree of dismay among some California Democrats intense enough to suggest a secessionist movement could take advantage while passions remained relatively hot.

“It wasn’t until Trump’s victory last month that mainstream U.S. outlets — including the Sacramento Bee, the L.A. Times and NPR — covered the group more seriously,” KQED noted. “The story got new legs because several influential tech figures took to Twitter to voice their desire for California to leave the union after Trump’s election. Among them was Shervin Pishevar, an investor and co-founder of Hyperloop One, a startup promoting a futuristic new transportation technology.”

Although no elected officials have promoted the breakaway effort, tempers have flared around the idea that a Trump presidency would try to stymie state Democrats, seen by many party members nationwide as a progressive vanguard on social and environmental issues.

In a recent San Francisco speech before the American Geophysical Union, for instance, Gov. Jerry Brown vowed to press ahead with the state’s current climate policy regardless of what happens in Washington. “If Trump turns off the satellites, California will launch its own damn satellite,” he said, according to the IBTimes. “We’ve got the scientists, we’ve got the lawyers and we’re ready to fight.”

Rough going

Despite the flurry of attention, from Russia, Marinelli’s personal political reach in California was likely to remain limited. To date, his track record has been spotty. He “filed a handful of statewide ballot measures related to secession in 2015 and none qualified for the November ballot,” the Sacramento Bee recalled. “He also waged an unsuccessful campaign to represent state Assembly District 80, but didn’t advance beyond the June primary.”

This piece was originally published by CalWatchdog.com

California secessionists unveil independence measure

As reported by the Mercury News:

It still doesn’t have much of a ring – or chance of ever happening – but Calexit isn’t going away just yet.

As President-elect Donald Trump continued interviewing prospective appointees on Monday, the left-leaning leaders of a movement to make California a sovereign nation filed paperwork to take their case to voters in two years.

Inspired by this year’s Brexit vote that withdrew the United Kingdom from the European Union, the organization Yes California wants voters in November 2018 to repeal a section of the state constitution affirming that California is “an inseparable part” of the United States and determine whether they wanted to secede.

A “yes” vote would trigger a special election the following March in which residents would decide if “California should become a free, sovereign and independent country.”

Another “yes” vote would require the governor of the newly minted “Republic of California” to apply to the United Nations for membership. …

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