Dmitry Orlov, author of Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects, is one of the latter.
Soon, he told Raw Story in an exclusive interview, Americans will "stop expecting anything of Washington," turning the US into more of a "banana republic" than a superpower.
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4 comments:
Dmitry - great to see you back. Wonderful interview, and right on the mark. Democratic capitalism is now showing its real teeth... Orwellian fascism!! Find a good seat, and watch the Spectacle unfold. Hope you all are well. sandy
The comments on that page were pretty much what I expected.
I forgot though, that most people believe what BP has told them about the Gulf of Mexico.
I was personally surprised to find that many people I know, believed that it was all magically cleaned up as soon as they shut the leak off.
I guess these people believe that if you repair a backed up toilet, then the mess instantly cleans itself up.
The BP disaster is our Chernobyl. The Gulf of Mexico has suffered massive damage that will take many hundreds of years to recover from. the lower depths are still toxic to oxygen breathing organisms.
It was quite the drama though, wasn't it? Watching BP try all of the techniques that have failed in the past, ticking them off one by one as the oil spews. Then eventually, after massive damage has been caused, finally resort to a fairly simple solution has worked in the past.
One might wonder if they didn't kill the Gulf on purpose so they wouldn't have to deal with those pesky environmental regulations anymore. Just because the oil industry has done this before, doesn't mean they'd do it here, does it?
It's strange to see that this collapse is playing out.. albeit slower than the American ADD can handle. When I traveled across Russia to Vladivostok and back, the majority of freight trains were filled with chewed up rubble - scrap metal and rocks. I was told that these were from factories in the east (and former republics) being dismantled and sold as scrap. Today, we have an whole industry, to scrap our old factories..... It can, and is, happening here.
The empire is crumbling, both from within and abroad. US sponsored oilgarchs and dictators being challenged and ousted, people starting to revolt against government and the status quo at all levels
Has anyone been following the latest news? I do not know if it is my imagination, but as the commercial collapse begins to gain momentum, the social and cultural collapses seem to as well. Some would argue that this has been going on for awhile now, but I am noticing a period of heightening apprehension that seems to breed a climate of desperation, anger, and social unrest both at home and abroad.
I have been keeping tabs on the headlines on the internet, both in the US and around the world. This recent murder/suicide seems to confirm the worst fears that many of us may have had after reading Reinventing Collapse, about how middle aged men, whose ego was intertwined with the system, were more inclined to "snap". http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20110115/METRO02/101150359/Family-dead-in-Novi-murder-suicide http://www.detnews.com/article/20110114/METRO02/101140451/1408/LOCAL http://www.macombdaily.com/articles/2009/11/17/news/srv0000006848039.txt ...and the one I will never forget, the Santa Claus murderer in CA a few years back http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2008560960_shoot26.htm
A recently unemployed aerospace egineer, like the Novi murder/suicide, was living in a McMansion when that pink slip arrived from his employers....
The "man next door", an volunteer usher at a local church. Men lose their jobs, their unemployment and then their savings run out, then the wife that swore to love him in times of sickness and in health files for a divorce. The man "snaps" and unfortunately goes after his wife and children. I believe this is an epidemic that has been going on and will continue to get worse until the media will start to take note and make a circus out of it.
We have judges and politicians being shot at it Tucson, AZ. The irony to me is that this man was denied entry into the military because he had admiited to previous drug use. I guess the armed forces think that casual drug users are too immoral to bomb, shoot, maim and kill people in the Third World. Then an increase in violence fanning out from the Metro Dteroit area
http://www.detnews.com/article/20110117/METRO02/101170400/1409/METRO
I had said in a previous blog that Detroit had closed some 20 schools. Now with the new budgets, they are proposing shutting down one half of them http://www.theblaze.com/stories/detroit-may-close-half-of-its-schools-to-pay-for-union-benefits/
People did not believe me when I posted about poor childern being plucked from the hot lunch lines at school and given the "alternative".http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/school-lunch-money-and-cold-cheese-sandwiches/
This story particulalry drew my attention because around the same time the good folks at NASA had managed to bomb the moon in order to find water there in what is a vain, futile, and costly delusion that humans will one day colonize space. Nobody once ever suggested the wisdom of such a notion, given that we had already all but thoroughly destroyed the planet we are trying to live on, earth, and that if we cannot get it together and get along here, we will never make in it space, nor should we.
While the elderly are being allowed to freeze to death in their homes and food taken from the mouth's of babies in schools that are deteriorating, we have the funds for this kind of nonsense? The initial reponses to the collapse process should be alarming for most people
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