Adieu Belgium ?

Most Americans are caught in the never ending vortex of the Gulf oil spill. In the argument as to whether Obama failed miserably, or BP lied and cheated, we forget our oil addiction. When president Carter warned us that it would come back to haunt us in 1977(!!!), he was ridiculed and was stuck for ever with the word "malaise". He was right! Those who accuse Obama of incompetence have zero notion of the responsability and duties of a president. They also conveniently forget that, under the influence of the oil lobby and certain bought politicians (remember the Dick Cheney secret energy meeting?), everything has been done under the sun to remove all safeguards, safety measures, inspection, etc. The same people who gave you Enron, the Wall Street carnage of 2008 and the recent WV mining catastrophe, are now serving us with a gusher that nobody knos how to stop. Not a great publicity for those who advocate the supremacy of the private sector.
In the meantime, unbeknownst to the majority of Americans, brave little Belgium is fading away. The country that aroused anger and pity in 1914, is voting itself out of existence. Sunday's legislative elections gave victory to the NVA party of Bart de Wever, whose platform is the independence of Flanders, the northern majority of Dutch speaking Belgians. The French speaking minority, impoverished by a rust belt economy voted itself a socialist government. No doubt Mr De Wever will want to initiate a split. His model is the smooth divorce between the Czech and Slovak republics. Would the French speaking region want to rejoin France? Would France take them? What about the 80,000 German speaking Belgians? Actually, this could be the beginning of the unraveling of the Nation-State. Local affairs can be handled by Regions (Corsica, Britanny, Bvaria, Scotland, Alsace, the Basque region), and world affairs can be handled by the EU.