The World to Come

It's the lawsuits that have caused all the problems in our medical system. When I was young, insurance payments only covered medical expenses but not anymore. Everyone wants to get rich not by producing, but by grabbing what they can from others.

Doctors were complaining about having to pay 200 thousand a year for medical insurance 40 years ago. And to think that at one time we had the best doctors and hospitals in the world.

 

Nor have millions of people, priests included.

 

Most of the OP sounds like nonsense, but he's definitely right about one point: The clock is ticking on the time left on the US dollar being the world's reserve currency. Once that goes, the demand for Treasuries drops, and interest rates on Treasury bonds shoot up, making it judgement day for our national debt. At that point, the US decline will really pick up.

 

Well, for once, I get to disagree with you!

Hedges is putting forth the typically schizophrenic narrative that paints Trump's base - largely middle and working class Christians from the south and the midwest - as some kind of nascent neo-Nazi army that stands ready to purge society of gays and Muslims and racial minorities. Robert E. Lee will become a hero in the new fascist America, warns Hedges! I guess we're just supposed to ignore the fact that Robert E. Lee fought AGAINST the capitalists in northern financial centers like New York City? Not sure, then, how Lee figures into the designs of the decaying neoliberal establishment. The far more likely scenario is that reactionary tyranny in fallen America will emanate, not from the small conservative towns dotting the south and the midwest, but from the large urban power centers that rely heavily on the financialization of the global economy.

 

Well not many Catholic priests included. And now the current Pope has been covering it up. In any other world the Catholic Church would be a criminal enterprise. And then of course we could be really mean and go back to their support of the Hitler extermination of the Jews.

 

Vulgar twaddle. What is "established religion" if it isn't the sort of thing we see on the religious right in the USA? Where in Europe is nationalism and the "established religion" the same? In Ireland the Catholic Church is out of step with the people and has historically collaborated with imperialism to trade national aspirations for religious rights. In England the Church of England is increasingly a centre for liberal tolerance. In France the "laicite" of the French establishment trumps a declining Church again and again. In Germany there is no established religion, only Protestants in the North and Catholics in Bavaria. Christians in Germany have often been a bulwark against nationalism. Should we go on? In the USA the right wing establishment (that lies and deceives to make itself invisible) is one of Christian fundamentalist billionaires. The dominance of white evangelists in the new Republican Party matches an emerging establishment with a dogmatic and seventeenth century version of Christianity.

Now this is swivel eyed stuff but is pretty ordinary fare for the religious establishment in the USA today. "Strict adherence" is puritan language. Not the stuff of the progressive science loving iconoclasts that were the founding fathers of the USA.

So these new Tories take the Constitution - a monument to liberalism and progress in world history - and make it into a biblical tract to support reaction and a divinely appointed King (so is the religious view of Trump's accession to the throne, in true Tory style).

Liberals are "fascists" apparently. Does the writer have the slightest insight into the world of the fasces? Fascists nearly always adopted established religion rather than persecuting it. Fascists were routed in the petty bourgeoisie and the lumpen proletariat, just like the Tea Party and Trump's base is. Fascists did not like elections, just like those people who say that the US is a republic but not a democracy. Fascists would create scapegoats and bogey men through lies to frighten people - just like the lies that Trump tells about a national invasion coming from Mexico when most illegals in the US are overstayers and most terrorists and mass murderers are middle aged white men. Fascist may not be the right term for today's extreme reactionaries, but the parallels are very clear.

"Liberal oppression" will lead to a war? That's fascist stuff itself ...incitement to violence not very subtly concealed...a scorched earth political approach. It's swaggering populism.

And so we watch America sinking into decline....

I expect they are being fed to the lions no? It's so nonsensical that it almost cannot be rebutted. Say something monstrous, a lie, outrageous and keep saying it... and it will become true. How oppressed are they? Who is in prison in the USA for their religious beliefs? Tell me how America keeps electing atheists who want to kill Christians? Tell me how many people on the SCOTUS are not Christian? How many members of Congress? It is of course such a filthy lie that is designed to blame the victims - those minorities that the American Christian establishment has always oppressed since it hanged Mary Dyer in Boston. As such it is an act of hate to propagate such lies.

More drivel. Religious rights are not given by the Constitution. Read it seeing as you think it is infallible truth. Try the bit that starts "Congress shall make no law...". The natural rights that are recognised (no right are "given" by the Constitution) are the right to freedom of conscience and freedom of speech. Natural rights. Liberal rights. Enlightenment rights. Progressive rights.

Inept American exceptionalist nonsense. The first sentence is just gibberish. The USA is a European project and directly descended from European history (indeed it is an extension of the English Revolution and the ideas of the French philosophes). Social services and schools are dependent on religious charities ALL OVER THE WORLD.

The Catholic Church is full of practicing homosexuals. Any Catholic will tell you that.

Really...you get to deduct charitable donations from your tax returns... wow what a nation you are....! You think other nations do not have this?

Research by the Charities Aid Foundation shows that larger proportions of Australians, Canadians, Brits, Irish, Dutch, Hong Kongers ...the list goes on...give money to charity than Americans.

As to charitable donations in the US ($400 billion) being greater than the GDP of China ($13 trillion), why do you need to protest your goodness with such lies?

Stinking American hypocrisy ... the sign of an Empire in terminal decline.

 

Exceedingly encouraging words. I wish I were young enough to be around for the 10-count knockdown. Hopefully, my children will have the honour of witnessing it.

 

I think the quote in the OP, "Out goes democracy and in its comes naked force" says most of it. "Decades"? I think so. Just now the cowering weak minds are gathering at the feet of the brute. It will take a few courageous souls to strike before the weak dare take any action and it will be in the form of support ... as always. Once that happens it will be a matter of only a few years before the final blow is administered. But yes, decades from now - for certain.

 

The wealthy elite are either people who respect their responsibility to society or they are angry, fearful xenophobes who feel that their plantation is all that matters and screw the rest.

What Hedges missed was the fact that those plantations will quickly turn to luxurious staterooms on the Titanic if working families are pushed too far.
He talks of unrest, but the larger boogeyman that elites should fear is killing the geese that lay the golden eggs.

The wealthiest class still depend upon us for their fortunes, and a society reduced to buying red Kool-Aid, beans and rice and living in broken down cars and tenements spells doom for the ownership class.
Even the millionaires below the billionaires see the torches and pitchforks but long before that eerie glow they see collapse.
They don't want either, they want to make a deal, and if the folks above them won't, they might just join the peasants.

 

A gentle reminder:
Reality tee vee is not actual reality.
No matter what you see or hear from the masters of reality tee vee, once you take your eyes away from the screen and open a window, actual reality filters in.

The country is being run by a master of the reality tee vee genre.

 

As is happening with the Yellow Vests in Macron's France. Quite possible, I think.

In the UK it is the fringe areas in the North - well away from the eyes, concerns and cares of the London neoliberal elite - that Brexit has its hard core voters.

I recently watched a yellow vest congregation being beaten by the Gendarmes in a small regional town in the Dordogne - a sleepy town I know well and well away from the power centre of Paris.

All three nations seem to share very similar grievances (if what you say is correct) from their forgotten citizens which is that they do not feature, at all, in the plans of the brigade of internationalists. They are the forgotten ones and they know it. One is reminded of Greece and the German financial yoke applied to it as a warning to all in order to save French and German banks from their self inflicted death throes.

The lesson to take from this, I suspect, is that if you force a situation beyond tolerable limits, it will collapse from its own inherent weakness.

However, I should add that I do see a collapse of the dollar ahead resulting from an aggregation of nations no longer using it as a reserve currency- and the resultant collapse will perpetuate its rapid decline. The national debt is simply not manageable and the inward investment that currently supports this massive burden will be the first to abandon ship when peril looms. Greed is not a reliable fellow traveller.

 

I'm less certain about the decades you envisage. It could just go overnight. Prof Alfred McCoy predicts 2030 but says it could be as early as 2025 (HERE). So... we might both see it happen in our remaining lifetimes.

 

Heavy reading and a bleak prediction for the future of the U.S.

We might witness the beginning of it but I do not think we'll see the whole shebang. I'll be 72 next month and I'll be lucky if I am still kicking 10 years from now.

 

It's not entirely a case of the national debt not being manageable. The first thing that happens when a reserve currency is abandoned is that less and less entities BUY our debt, which is actually a store of value. Please don't labor under the mistaken impression that ALL of our national debt is a bad thing, because were all of it to be erased tomorrow, it would be a catastrophe equal to or worse than our currency being dropped as a reserve.
Erase all our debt and you erase a lot of money.

In fact, referring to our monstrous 23 trillion dollar national debt as a monolithic thing is inaccurate at best. A fair portion of that debt is actually a good thing.

 

I should have said our charitable giving's are more than most nations GDP. But charitable giving's does include the money given to universities and schools as well. Anyway It's hard to reason with someone with so much anger and hatred, but I'll try.

In the past all the European nations had an established Church. It was part of their national identity, and because of that European nationalists continue to identify themselves as Christians.

In America each colony was given by the King to a different denomination, and so each one had their own Church. When they broke from Britain, the colonies feared that the Federal government will establish it's own Church and they won't be able to worship as they pleased.

To resolve the problem and eliminate their fears, there is an amendment in our Constitution of separation of Church and State. This was to protect the American people from the government so that they would always have the right to worship as they please. We were also given the right to bear arms, probably to protect us from government tyranny.

The powers given to the Federal government was very limited, almost all the rights were given to the States so as to insure our freedoms. Conservatives are strict adherents of our Constitution and the freedoms that we were given. They do not want a strong Federal government, while the liberals in contrast believe in a strong Federal government and less freedom. They want to impose their own beliefs on others.

Now put on your thinking cap, wouldn't this be the opposite of conservatives in Europe since they are nationalists and are usually adherents of a strong central government? Now when I say conservatives I'm not talking about Washington's neo conservatives who are socially liberal and switch over whenever the Republicans are in power so they can maintain control. They have their own agenda such as a strong support for Israel and wars.

 

And yet I read that the Pope was hiding 20 thousand Jews in the Vatican and asked all the priests and nuns in Rome to hide the Jews in the hospitals and monasteries at the risk of their own lives. So tell me, would you risk your life to save a Christian? I don't think so!

 

Yep. On both counts.

Nothing is certain for sure -- we can but hope.

I'm not far behind you btw.

 

That we can.

 

What do mean by "erase"? The definition is important. Are you suggesting that the US will have to repudiate its debt or that the world will need to forgive it? Which of these two do you means -- as I'm unaware of other possibilities (repayment of it is now virtually impossible given its size now).

Btw, I wasn't suggesting that the US will "abandon" - to use your curious term - reserve currency status. I am saying, as does McCoy, Hedges etc., that the rest of the world will increasingly seek alternatives other than the dollar and that the dollar debt mountain will quickly implode following growing global disinvestment.

That is why the decisions to invoke sanctions here, there and everywhere is so stupidly self-destructive in the longer term; it's a case of the US forcing other nations to find alternatives to the dollar. And they are. Even Homer could see the madness inherent in this.

In both of the two above cases (repudiation or forgiveness), the result will be the end of the dollar as a reserve currency. Period. The technical term for such an event would be a: double-whammy catastrophe.

 

Maybe the size of the US national debt is why the Democrats won't give The Donald the cash for his wall? I can't think of any other reason.

 

I guess it is about 35 years that I've been paying attention to international finance and the like.

The one constant theme through all that time is that doom is just around the corner.

 

It's very simple really, Mr. Cerberus. The globalist want to flood America with 3-rd world mob, just like they do here in Europe.

 

Silly accusation.

 

I can barely wait to hear the answer.

 

Sorry but " I read" carries no weigh on a fact basis. Do you or do you not have a valid source?