The America we once knew is gone forever. The 21st century has dawned just as the true light of liberty fades into shadow. The sooner the world recognizes this, the better off humankind will be. RussiaGate, Bill and Hillary Clinton revelations, Donald Trump’s quasi-populist misdirect, and a great nation turned amoral, this and much more forewarn of a cataclysm.
I’ll tell you about the instant I gave up on America ever being great again. When my oldest friend failed to reach me on Skype a few weeks back, a strange reconnect on his device put me in the position of a fly on the wall with he and two other high school friends. At first, I thought my old friend and I were connected as per usual, on a conference call. Then, when I realized I could hear them without the trio hearing me, the real American tragedy unfolded. The realization struck me hard, I’ll tell you. Listening to old pals discuss my new book that debunks many RussiaGate lies, “Putin’s Praetorians” met with nasty and harsh criticism without my chums having even read what is inside. Their obtuse and unfair criticism made me finally realized Vladimir Putin and the Russian people have no chance whatsoever – no chance of ever being friends with the United States of America. Three intelligence college graduates, professional men, demonstrated the utter ignorance of a people. Some of my closest friends shouted in my ears that day; “the propaganda worked – CNN has already won.”I know this is a harsh reality for many of you to accept. Losing hope is not something to take lightly. But get ready, the war will come eventually.
When Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election the hopeful among us considered his victory a successful populist revolt against the Washington swamp of globalists. Trump swore to us he would take on the technocrats and the elites in favor of the “forgotten of America” – and the new president sold himself as a man of the people. However, billionaires are not ordinary people, and we should all have remembered this. Many of us voted Trump just to keep a certified psychopath from winning, but Trump and Clinton are nothing more than symptoms of a far more widespread contagion. Now let me describe the infectious host my country has become, and a bit on how Lady Liberty will finally succumb.
The United States of America is the modern and digitalized Rome. Just why we were not taught this in grade school, it escapes me. After all, we always believed our teachers and trusted them to tell us the truth. The unarguable fact that Americans have been the most privileged people on Earth since World War II. But we were told for decades that our privilege was due to our industriousness, our intelligence, and because God had blessed us. In the 1950’s and early 1960’s this may have really been true. For those who recall that we made stuff back then, and that we conformed more often to our religious convictions, my meaning here is clear to you. We Americans benefitted largely because of our hard work back then, and not sometimes because of brilliant industrialists too. Then the two Kennedy brothers were shot and killed, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X were assassinated, and Lyndon Baines Johnson and his boys carried us into Vietnam. In the meantime, those of us too young (or chicken) to fight in southeast Asia, we got our fill of Woodstock, a popular anti-war movement and the hippie revolution, and decades of drug culture that nobody talks about much these days. But this component of the American metamorphosis is far too important and massively deep to discuss here. It should suffice those from that era to know, that “I” know what you know. This was the moment the American people dipped themselves in the narcotic of too much self-love and when we began to exceed and excel in moral promiscuity. Today an entire nation is drowning in a sea of vanity that originated back then. We saw this moral lasciviousness when the last President, Barack Obama spat out our “exceptionalism” right in the world’s face. Let’s now take a candid look at this how collectively extraordinary we Americans have been.
“A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today. The Western world has lost its civic courage . . . . Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elite, causing an impression of a loss of courage by the entire society.” ― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
I’ll not even attempt to describe the rise of consumerism in America following WW II, nor can anyone explain in such limited space how the average American benefitted from our role in that war. As the only major nation untouched (literally) by the massive destructive force of the world war, the United States quickly became a nation blessed with a giant middle class. And with this burgeoning middle class came a youth culture that will absolutely melt down when the next big crisis comes. This foreboding moment can be understood if we look at American society’s rise to affluence in the 60’s, 70’s, and even the 1980’s, as compared to the disenfranchised in the country today. But I said I would not delve too deeply into this part of Americanism. What makes the United States even an unique country in modern times is how the world lost while America consumed. Make no mistake about it, the real American exceptionalism cost every man, woman, and child on Earth an incalculable price. Citizens of my country have used fully one-fourth of every resource utilized since World War II, and the ongoing wars and corporate shenanigans perpetuated the damage. Up until the 21st century, the curve of American gluttony rose sharply in between 1900 and 1995. A paper (PDF) entitled; “Consumption of Materials in the United States, 1900–1995”, from the USGS by Grecia Matos and Lorie Wagner discusses this in depth. Here is the short version from the paper on materials use:
“During this century, the quantity of materials consumed has grown, from 161 million metric tons in 1900 to 2.8 billion metric tons by 1995, an equivalent of 10 metric tons per person per year.”
The report details our consumption from many directions including environmental impacts, and so on. Nowhere is our “exceptional” appetite for world resources more prevalent than in our energy use. This report from 2011 shows how America went stark raving mad using coal, natural gas, petroleum ánd nuclear energy after WW II. For comparative purposes, Americans used about 10 quadrillion btu’s of petroleum in 1945, as compared to just over 40 quadrillion btu’s at the peak in 2005-2006. On energy, it’s fair to assert here that all those “energy wars” the so-called conspiracy theorists write about are real news stories, rather than fake concoctions. But let’s forget about American politicians opening up North America for a toxic fracking future for the moment. This Scientific American story points to Americans as the least sustainable society on Earth. From the article Sierra Club’s Dave Tilford tells us:
“The average American will drain as many resources as 35 natives of India and consume 53 times more goods and services than someone from China.”
The final take here is telling. The United States, with less than 5 % of the global population, uses more than 25% of the world’s fossil fuel resources, by burning up nearly 25 % of the coal, 26 % of the oil, and 27 % of the world’s natural gas. Another way of looking at our “exceptional” self-destructiveness is to think how many “worlds” it would take to support humanity, if everyone consumed like we do. But this my point is the fact that our addictive and suicidal behavior costs all of humanity. America’s unique exceptionalism will very soon lead to a horrific cataclysm for out sick culture. I’ll frame for you now.
“Sick cultures show a complex of symptoms such as you have named…but a dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot.” ― Robert A. Heinlein, Friday
Drugged on the self-aggrandizing drugs of excess, lude and lascivious lifestyles, and utter godlessness, the United States is all set for an apocalypse few in my country see. Before I describe how this cataclysm will likely play out, let me introduce an economic surety. Debt and constricted growth are about to cause a gigantic bubble to burst.
Most readers may not know that the world’s central banks are about to be decimated. The balance sheets of most of these banks have gone from an indebtedness of $6 trillion in 2007 to over $21 trillion today. To make matters worse, the rate of debt expansion exceeds a pace of $200 billion every month. In the UK, the Bank of England prints money on a pace to equal that of the European Central Bank (ECB) and even the Bank of Japan in a hopeless effort of Quantitative Easing (QE) that involves buying the bonds – or debts – of governments and investment grade companies. Subsequently, bond prices have shot sky high, while yields are now at record lows. A further indication is contained in a rather innocentpress release about UBS Wealth Management’s UBS Global Real Estate Bubble Index 2017. According to this news San Francisco and other real estate markets are ripe for a second devastating housing bubble catastrophe. Also included in the report are; Amsterdam, Stockholm, Munich, Vancouver, Sydney, Hong Kong, New York, Los Angeles, and Boston. I could go on and on presenting indicators such as the massive $750 billion dollar trade deficit America runs. But pointing out the reality of America’s $20 trillion dollar national debt is useless for swaying even one typical consumption addict to pay attention. Like my pals who refused to even crack open a book before condemning a friend, most Americans are simply too ignorant and self-involved to give facts a glance. When the lie of CNN or Bloomberg will do, as long as the cheap gas flows, Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again (MAGA)” slogan is a fairytale. America has not been great in a very long time, and she never will be great again. Now let me show you who knows this.
Like Rome, the heyday of America’s empire was been based on expansion and growth. Propped up with militarism and the legendary military industrial complex, Washington has played Wall Street’s gambit for many decades. The recent villainizing of Russia and her president Vladimir Putin is not about the spread of democracy, it’s about Putin standing in the way of privatizing like that which occurred under Yeltsin. Putin is in a fight against the American supported liberal world order bent on gobbling up Russia’s massive resources to fuel further American (plus EU & British) addictions. Without new markets and resources America will very soon be out of gas – literally. So, assuming I am correct here, what happens when a land of consumer zombies runs out of gas (or food)? This Fortune Magazine article speaks of an education economics bubble about to destroy lives and dreams on a scale never witnessed. The foreboding article touches on but one facet of a fractured American society – the society presidents, senators, and congresspersons swore would benefit from high tech jobs and new age technologies. Now that I’ve painted a small portrait of dread, insert all the twenty-something and thirty-something smart phones you saw in use yesterday in town! You forty-something and fifty-something readers, can you sense the domino effect when the entitled youth cannot get cell service or buy a cappuccino? For further reading on this catastrophe see Zero Hedge and read Ron Paul’s assessment of the imminent doomsday. My conclusion here is pretty short and sweet.
“Of the twenty-two civilizations that have appeared in history, nineteen of them collapsed when they reached the moral state the United States is in now.” ― Arnold Joseph Toynbee
Vladimir Putin is the barometer everyone should watch. And Vladimir Putin has all but given up on reconciliation with the west. This report from World Socialist Web outlines reports that suggest Putin is ramping up in preparations for the coming war. At the recent Sochi meetup, the Russian president had this to offer on Russia’s economy being prepared:
“The ability of our economy to increase military production and services at a given time is one of the most important aspects of military security. To this end, all strategic and simply large-scale enterprise should be ready, regardless of ownership.”
Putin’s recent moves, his ongoing pragmatism during these new crises, and the “all or nothing” approaches of western governments toward Russia tell us all we need to know here. Putin is admittedly testing the capability of Russia’s economy to defend in an all-out war with the west. Read Alex Lantier’s article above, then correlate everything you can find on global defense in the last few months. Putin is only following suit after NATO recently discussed improving infrastructure for war-making. In Moscow the thinkers know once the petro-yuan replaces the dollar, that general chaos will rein in America. And the American globalists know this too. Now imagine a dollar being worth ten cents. Imagine store shelves empty and several million more foreclosures. Imagine Apple not selling iPhones for two months. Visualize what happens in America if another big recession hits now. The kid who was 12 when 2008 rolled around, is now 21 with a college degree and a mountain of student loan debt, working at McDonald’s to pay for an $800 dollar smart phone. Fox News just reported on the 5 dead and 20 wounded in Chicago over the Thanksgiving weekend, and Trump’s policies have been a shot in the arm for Wall Street. If the big bubble bursts the disenfranchised will turn to cannibalism. Putin and the Washington swamp knows this too.
“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”- John Adams
So, when America does finally succumb to the death throes we’ve seen happening the last thirty years or more… They’ll push the button, you bet they will. Zombies could care less about Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Ukraine, Palestine, Syria and Yemen. You unplug the intravenous joy and it’s over. And this is the truth of an America since 1955. Find yourself a cave here on Crete, fort up and get ready. It’s coming.
Phil Butler, is a policy investigator and analyst, a political scientist and expert on Eastern Europe, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”