The World to Come

Chris hedges in his below article foresees the America soon to arrive when neoliberal ideology meets the Mack truck of financial reality, when the US dollar is dropped as the World Reserve currency:

"The United States is a wounded beast, bellowing and thrashing in its death throes. It can inflict tremendous damage, but it cannot recover. These are the last, agonizing days of the American Empire. "

Out goes democracy and in its comes naked force:

"A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial,” George Orwell wrote. “That is when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud.” Our elites have exhausted fraud. Force is all they have left."

The American elite are, he says, preparing to introduce harsh measures to control widespread popular unrest and stifle by brute force an American style Yellow Vest protest, so they can cling to power.

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-world-to-come/

 

'The bigger they are, the harder they fall'?

 

Keep hoping. Apparently hope is all you have.

 

The outcome is uncertain... and even if it ends as he describe with the demise of the US I think it will take decades.

What is certain is that there is a fierce push to return to what was "pre-Obama" before Kerry brought Iran in from the cold. There's a battle raging on almost every level you can imagine, socially, financially even culturally, militarily and on a corporate level for domination. Most days I feel like a spectator in a Roman circus...

 

Smoking crack can't work forever. Let's hope they can go cold Turkey.

 

I like your sentiment. Let's hope.

 

Societies change over time.

Never fails.

To think America will never change would be to ignore every bit of historical evidence contrary to that fact.

We have been fortunate that our constitution is extremely flexible allowing us to weather moderate changes and still maintain its core principles.

How will it hold up during a radical change?

We will see one day but it did survive the Civil War so I have hope.

 

The world of demographics indicates that you are wrong in that the white race world wide is dying off far faster than it is being replenished.White supremacy is killing it's self off with it's late in life marriages and extremely ;ow birth rates.

 

Come on man, this one doesn't even make any sense .....

Major economies all over the world are having some pretty big problems, meanwhile the US economy is currently one of the strongest in the world.

You anti-American guys act like the Dollar being the "reserve currency" is some kind of on off switch that people vote on and decide. It is so because people trust the Dollar compared to that of other countries. Even if some major catastrophe happened, it would drag down like hell all the other currencies with it. If and when that happens, it is going to be one crazy chaotic mess.

I am actually sitting in KLA waiting to fly home to California and I can tell you, the talk over here is how China is faltering and America is strengthening.

Until there is some total collapse of the current global system, these crazy tailspin theories aren't much more than fantasies.

 

The Russians are to blame for everything. Here is the proof.
Putin intervenes in US domestic politics.

 

...

 

Jeb will kick his Russian ASS

 

people may be wrong but the expectation is that there is going to be another 2008 within the next couple of years and possibly with that, which the US has nothing left to use to get out of, or something else, the US is going to stop being the Reserve Currency - or there may be alternatives which will weaken the US. Whatever the reason another big fall is expected. You are correct that other countries are suffering as the US is. The US however responds in it's own way and that is what troubles Hedges. At the moment there is a massive increase in drink and drug problems and suicide with white middle aged American's. One of the reasons put for this is that you are brought up to believe you all have the possibility to make it big, if you don't it is because you failed. Black middle aged American's do not have this big shift to drugs/drink and suicide, the argument being that they knew all along that they did not have an equal chance so do not see their failing as being personal. We are all for the first time since WW2 seeing a situation where we cannot expect our children to do as well as us nor their children as well as them. That is the future. Hedges believes this has left white working/middle class people feeling like they do not belong within the norms in the States and that is why people like Trump appeal to them. He believes if the US is not going to face an extremely violent future it is essential that something like the New Deal be brought in to give them opportunities, let them feel they are valuable and belong in society. Without that and given your violent history, he greatly fears for the US. Other countries will be affected and act differently. Currently the US having elected someone as iliterate as Trump who believes the Climate change which is currently causing Artic Temperatures in the US is a sure sign there is no such thing as global warming, is acting in a way which will destroy human existence anyway so maybe that will be the future the US is creating.

 

I agreed with him up until he took a sudden left turn in the middle of the fifth paragraph, going off on a loony screed against Conservative Christians.

 

From Abundance to Complacency
From Complacency to Apathy
From Apathy to Dependence
From Dependence to back into Bondage

We are in one of the last stages, it will happen sooner or later and with a corrupt government that rings up deficits year after year an economic collapse will occur. While many will celebrate, those idiots forget history and have no idea of the death and destruction that a power vacuum of that size will cause.

 

He is left wing.

He is an ordained Protestant Minister himself and spent 2 years lurking in your extreme right Christian Congregations. He is certainly meaning Dominionism and several of your well known politicians belong to that. Not all the Christian Right are that bad. It is reckoned only about 40 million. However the rest can be brought to vote for those who are to get into Government. Hedges believes that if fascism comes to the US which he strongly believes it will it will be using Christianity as its ideology and progressive Christians like himself will be one of the first they come after. He does not believe they are Christian, claims they are only interested in Revelation and other parts of the bible which allow them to be violent. He believes from his experience with them that they destroy families though they speak of seeing them of prime importance and are now firmly entrenched in your Government and your Legal system.

 

Going by what they are constantly being arrested for the majority of your extremely right wing Christian leaders, (the Preachers, Deacons, etc) are mainly in their religion so they can rape their congregation's underage daughters, whom they use as their harem. The most well-known example of this was David Koresh and the Waco Wackos though it is a practice attributed even to Rasputin to my knowledge

 

It is indeed the end of the American Empire. The mistake is to see the failure of American nationalism when in fact it is the failure of American internationalism.

Remember as Paine said: " the cause of America is the cause of all mankind". That was some cause, abandoned now by Trump's "exceptionalist" American new Tories.

The opportunity to win a world, which would inevitably be dominated by yellow and brown people - humans all - has been lost by America. The United States, following on from the endless betrayal of Great Britain, has wallowed in chauvinism and its own sad provincialism and has wilfully abandoned its destiny as the "shining city on the hill". Where once it was the New Jerusalem, that offered freedom and the flowering of the human spirit to all the Russias, China and India, it is now just a fading ex colonial power, a bully and thug, diminishing in influence, just like its England before it.

The common mob, in England, America, France... all countries blest by reason and freedom... are now just wallowing in bread and circuses. You are scum you storied lands... and history will never forgive you.

https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofEngland/The-Hanging-of-the-Hartlepool-Monkey/

 

I don't think he's right. The US is not Europe where nationalism and the established religion is one and the same. Conservatism in the US is a strict adherence to our Constitution and that means less government control and more freedom for the people. In the US, it's the liberals who are fascists and want strong government control, and it's this liberal oppression over the rights of the majority that's going to lead us to a war.

Right now the people who are most oppressed are the Christians. An example is a baker in the Midwest who refused to write something on a wedding cake for a homosexual couple since it went against his religious beliefs. The homosexuals rather than going to another bakery, harassed him and took him to court. The baker had to go all the way up to the Supreme Court in order to reaffirm the religious rights that are given him by our Constitution.

Europeans can only relate the US to their own past, when we're a totally different ballgame. By doing so, they are taking certain groups and incidents out of context. What they don't realize is that many of our social services are dependent on religious charities. This includes hospitals, schools, homes for old people, etc.,

As an example, when the governor of New York State was pressured by the gay community to force Catholic schools to hire practicing homosexuals, the New York Archdiocese said it will close all its institutions before it goes against its religious doctrines. That was the end of that. Without the volunteers and the low costs of religious institutions, there would be no way the States could sustain them. They would go bankrupt.

The Catholic Church is only one example. There are also Evangelical institutions, Jewish etc. I read once that the charitable donations in the US exceeds the GDP of every nation in the world. We are allowed though to deduct part of the amounts we give from our tax returns.

 

" I read once that the charitable donations in the US exceeds the GDP of every nation in the world. We are allowed though to deduct part of the amounts we give from our tax returns."

That is only because money donated to churches count as a charitable deduction.

https://religousnotright.wordpress.com/2016/04/26/are-churches-really-charitable/

 

Oh that's okay, Washington is equalizing it by killing off brown people. Untermenchen you know, not fit for our liberal One World order.

The best way to lessen the world's population is to make nations prosperous, then they'll stop having kids. They'll also stop crashing our gates, but that's too decent a concept for our ideologues.

 

The difference between Church institutions and government institutions is the cost. In Church institutions most of the workers are volunteers, or they get a low wage, while a state institution the cost would be three times as much.

Also a religious institution will never turn someone down. My sister in law was in a coma for about a decade. She was lucky in that she was taken into a Catholic hospice, rather than a government one and had all the care she needed. A private one would have run into something like 200 thousand.

I know that if someone dies and there is no one to cover the cost of a funeral and burial that the Catholic Church will cover it, no matter what religious faith they are. Now that I stated what the Catholic Church does, tell me what have you have done lately for your fellow man?

 

I damn sure haven't molested any children.

 

You make a classic mistake, the assumption that people who talk about this are automatically "anti-American" or "cheering for American failure".
Is it remotely possible in your mind to consider the notion that at least SOME people with these opinions love America, and are terrified at what they're seeing?
Hedges only touched on the reserve currency thing in the beginning.
He describes both fiscal and social harbingers.

He spoke of plans by the elites which are not open secrets, they're highly public knowledge. The elites are proud of their plans.

You speak of chaos. So does he.
It is true that the US is a currency creator, but it is equally true that at some point, the rest of the world will make the decision to suffer the pain necessary to wean itself, or sour the milk...or even worse. We are not gods walking the Earth, but the world sees many of us bowing to a leader who views himself thus.