America Exhibits Many Indicators of Impending, Catastrophic Collapse

He hosts a wonderful present on RT referred to as ‘On Contact’. He speaks Arabic, French and Spanish and studied classics, together with historic Greek and Latin, at Harvard College. 

The Trump administration didn’t rise, prima facie, like Venus on a half shell from the ocean. Donald Trump is the results of an extended technique of political, cultural and social decay. He’s a product of our failed democracy. The longer we perpetuate the fiction that we stay in a functioning democracy, that Trump and the political mutations round him are someway an aberrant deviation that may be vanquished within the subsequent election, the extra we are going to hurtle towards tyranny.

The issue will not be Trump. It’s a political system, dominated by company energy and the mandarins of the 2 main political events, during which we don’t rely. We’ll wrest again political management by dismantling the company state, and this implies huge and sustained civil disobedience, like that demonstrated by lecturers across the nation this 12 months. If we don’t rise up we are going to enter a brand new darkish age.

The Democratic Social gathering, which helped construct our system of inverted totalitarianism, is as soon as once more held up by many on the left because the savior. But the social gathering steadfastly refuses to handle the social inequality that led to the election of Trump and the insurgency by Bernie Sanders. It’s deaf, dumb and blind to the very actual financial struggling that plagues over half the nation. It won’t battle to pay staff a residing wage.

It won’t defy the pharmaceutical and insurance coverage industries to offer Medicare for all. It won’t curb the voracious urge for food of the navy that’s disemboweling the nation and selling the prosecution of futile and dear overseas wars. It won’t restore our misplaced civil liberties, together with the suitable to privateness, freedom from authorities surveillance, and due course of. It won’t get company and darkish cash out of politics.

It won’t demilitarize our police and reform a jail system that has 25 % of the world’s prisoners though the USA has solely 5 % of the world’s inhabitants. It performs to the margins, particularly in election seasons, refusing to handle substantive political and social issues and as an alternative specializing in slim cultural points like homosexual rights, abortion and gun management in our peculiar species of anti-politics.

It is a doomed tactic, however one that’s comprehensible. The management of the social gathering, the Clintons, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Tom Perez, are creations of company America. In an open and democratic political course of, one not dominated by social gathering elites and company cash, these folks wouldn’t maintain political energy. They know this.

They’d reasonably implode the whole system than surrender their positions of privilege. And that, I concern, is what’s going to occur. The concept that the Democratic Social gathering is in any approach a bulwark towards despotism defies the final three a long time of its political exercise. It’s the guarantor of despotism.

Trump has tapped into the hatred that massive segments of the American public have for a political and financial system that has betrayed them. He could also be inept, degenerate, dishonest and a narcissist, however he adeptly ridicules the system they despise. His merciless and demeaning taunts directed at authorities companies, legal guidelines and the established elites resonate with folks for whom these companies, legal guidelines and elites have change into hostile forces. And for a lot of who see no shift within the political panorama to alleviate their struggling, Trump’s cruelty and invective are at the very least cathartic.

Trump, like all despots, has no moral core. He chooses his allies and appointees primarily based on their private loyalty and fawning obsequiousness to him. He’ll promote anybody out. He’s corrupt, amassing cash for himself—he made $40 million from his Washington, D.C., resort alone final 12 months—and his company allies.

He’s dismantling authorities establishments that when offered some regulation and oversight. He’s an enemy of the open society. This makes him harmful. His turbocharged assault on the final vestiges of democratic establishments and norms means there’ll quickly be nothing, even in title, to guard us from company totalitarianism.

However the warnings from the architects of our failed democracy towards creeping fascism, Madeleine Albright amongst them, are risible. They present how disconnected the elites have change into from the zeitgeist. None of those elites have credibility. They constructed the edifice of lies, deceit and company pillage that made Trump attainable. And the extra Trump demeans these elites, and the extra they cry out like Cassandras, the extra he salvages his disastrous presidency and permits the kleptocrats pillaging the nation because it swiftly disintegrates.

The press is without doubt one of the principal pillars of Trump’s despotism. It chatters endlessly like 18th-century courtiers on the courtroom of Versailles in regards to the foibles of the monarch whereas the peasants lack bread. It drones on and on and on about empty matters resembling Russian meddling and a payoff to a porn actress that don’t have anything to do with the every day hell that, for a lot of, defines life in America.

It refuses to critique or examine the abuses by company energy, which has destroyed our democracy and financial system and orchestrated the most important switch of wealth upward in American historical past. The company press is a decayed relic that, in alternate for cash and entry, dedicated cultural suicide.

And when Trump assaults it over “faux information,” he expresses, as soon as once more, the deep hatred of all these the press ignores. The press worships the idol of Mammon as slavishly as Trump does. It loves the reality-show presidency. The press, particularly the cable information exhibits, retains the lights on and the cameras rolling so viewers will likely be glued to a Twenty first-century model of “The Cupboard of Dr. Caligari.” It’s good for rankings. It’s good for earnings. Nevertheless it accelerates the decline.

All it will quickly be compounded by monetary collapse. Wall Road banks have been handed $16 trillion in bailouts and different subsidies by the Federal Reserve and Congress at almost zero % curiosity for the reason that 2008 monetary collapse. They’ve used this cash, in addition to the cash saved via the large tax cuts imposed final 12 months, to purchase again their very own inventory, elevating the compensation and bonuses of their managers and thrusting the society deeper into untenable debt peonage. Sheldon Adelson’s on line casino operations alone acquired a $670 million tax break beneath the 2017 laws.

The ratio of CEO to employee pay now averages 339 to 1, with the very best hole approaching 5,000 to 1. This round use of cash to make and hoard cash is what Karl Marx referred to as “fictitious capital.” The regular improve in public debt, company debt, bank card debt and pupil mortgage debt will finally lead, as Nomi Prins writes, to “a tipping level—when cash coming in to furnish that debt, or accessible to borrow, merely gained’t cowl the curiosity funds. Then debt bubbles will pop, starting with increased yielding bonds.”

An financial system reliant on debt for its progress causes our rate of interest to leap to twenty-eight % after we are late on a bank card cost. It’s why our wages are stagnant or have declined in actual phrases—if we earned a sustainable revenue we might not must borrow cash to outlive. It’s why a college schooling, homes, medical payments and utilities value a lot. The system is designed so we will by no means free ourselves from debt.

Nonetheless, the subsequent monetary crash, as Prins factors out in her e book “Collusion: How Central Bankers Rigged the World,” gained’t be just like the final one. It’s because, as she says, “there isn’t a Plan B.” Rates of interest can’t go any decrease. There was no progress in the actual financial system. The following time, there will likely be no approach out. As soon as the financial system crashes and the craze throughout the nation explodes right into a firestorm, the political freaks will seem, ones that can make Trump look sagacious and benign.

And so, to cite Vladimir Lenin, what should be executed?

We should make investments our power in constructing parallel, well-liked establishments to guard ourselves and to pit energy towards energy. These parallel establishments, together with unions, group improvement organizations, native currencies, different political events and meals cooperatives, must be constructed city by city.

The elites in a time of misery will retreat to their gated compounds and depart us to fend for ourselves. Fundamental providers, from rubbish assortment to public transportation, meals distribution and well being care, will collapse. Huge unemployment and underemployment, triggering social unrest, will likely be handled not via authorities job creation however the brutality of militarized police and a whole suspension of civil liberties. Critics of the system, already pushed to the margins, will likely be silenced and attacked as enemies of the state.

The final vestiges of labor unions will likely be focused for abolition, a course of that can quickly be accelerated given the anticipated ruling in a case earlier than the Supreme Court docket that can cripple the power of public-sector unions to symbolize staff. The greenback will cease being the world’s reserve foreign money, inflicting a steep devaluation. Banks will shut. International warming will extract heavier and heavier prices, particularly on the coastal populations, farming and the infrastructure, prices that the depleted state will likely be unable to handle.

The company press, just like the ruling elites, will go from burlesque to absurdism, its rhetoric so patently fictitious it’s going to, as in all totalitarian states, be unmoored from actuality. The media shops will all sound as fatuous as Trump. And, to cite W.H. Auden, “the little youngsters will die within the streets.”

As a overseas correspondent I coated collapsed societies, together with the previous Yugoslavia. It’s inconceivable for any doomed inhabitants to know how fragile the decayed monetary, social and political system is on the eve of implosion.

All of the harbingers of collapse are seen: crumbling infrastructure; continual underemployment and unemployment; the indiscriminate use of deadly power by police; political paralysis and stagnation; an financial system constructed on the scaffolding of debt; nihilistic mass shootings in faculties, universities, workplaces, malls, live performance venues and film theaters; opioid overdoses that kill some 64,000 folks a 12 months; an epidemic of suicides; unsustainable navy growth; playing as a determined instrument of financial improvement and authorities income; the seize of energy by a tiny, corrupt clique; censorship; the bodily diminishing of public establishments starting from faculties and libraries to courts and medical services; the incessant bombardment by digital hallucinations to divert us from the miserable sight that has change into America and preserve us trapped in illusions.

We endure the standard pathologies of impending loss of life. I’d be blissful to be fallacious. However I’ve seen this earlier than. I do know the warning indicators.

All I can say is: Get Prepared.