@Train,
Some of it I had to piece together.
I spent a lot of years wondering what the point of US involvement in the Middle East was. I always heard "It's about oil!" but that didn't make complete sense. The US has expended a
lot of capital operating over there. Why couldn't we just shift over to nuclear power, or use our own shale oil supplies, or use coal, and then we don't need all that oil?
A lot of it falls into place once you read about the origin of the petrodollar. Then you go look up the countries the US has regime-changed in the Middle East and look for what they all had in common. Some were peaceful, wealthy, secular countries (like Libya). Some were heavily restricted religious countries (like Afghanistan). Only that one thing they all have in common (selling oil for not-dollars).
You also need to read enough about money to understand how money gets its value. This article helped me fill in some gaps on monetary history and how the current system functions:
Guest Post by ICE-9 One topic missing from historians’ analysis of the West’s transition from a physical gold and silver based money system to a fiat money system is the defining events that facili…
web.archive.org
(reading about the end of Bretton Woods is also enlightening. Once Europe was rebuilt following WWII, the Europeans wanted to start getting out from under the American thumb. So in 1971 the French sent their Navy to US shores to demand the US give them gold in exchange for all the dollars they had. Other European countries heard about this and sent their ships out along with the French. So you had this entire European armada pulling up to the US saying, "Give us our gold, now!" President Nixon ended the gold standard immediately after that, out of fear all the dollars would be turned back in and the US would have to hand out all its gold. But once the gold standard ended, the dollar started to free fall. The US economy stagflated, and was in bad condition. Until -- they tied the dollar to oil. That also makes clear to you what would ever happen should oil become untied from the dollar again)
As for what's next for the US... well, that's hard to say.
The electoral system is no longer functional. But neither is the US at the point where "those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." The US is still wealthy enough that most people are not living in privation; nobody is starving; the people are soft. They'll go out and LARP at a BLM riot or march single-file into the Capitol building when the police hold the doors open but they're not going to form up battle ranks and seize territory.
Eventually if conditions get bad enough there, you may see people behave in more desperate, revolutionary ways. Unfortunately, intellectual thought is so far degraded that you won't get a new set of Founding Fathers. Instead you'd most likely end up with an ideologue tyrant. People want a strongman to come in and take control of the chaos and bring order to it, so that is what they'll get.
There's a possibility here, which is that the current elites are not omnipotent, but neither are they dumb, and clearly are aware of these historical trends. So they may seek to get out in front of this process and try to ensure that when it comes time for it, a strongman in their pocket ends up power. During the revolutions at the tail end of the Roman Republic, both the populists and the elites had competing strongman champions who took power in successive revolutions (Marius/Cinna for the people; Sulla for the elites; Julius Caesar for the people; Octavian, who ultimately established the new Roman Empire, for the elites).
On the other hand, that doesn't always go the elites' ways. Josef Stalin was an elite-chosen strongman who ultimately turned on the elite who chose him. Vladimir Putin was too (he imprisoned or exiled many of the oligarchs who'd been sucking Russia dry after the USSR collapsed... which was a big betrayal to these oligarchs, because they were the ones who brought him into power!). The US system long hated Cuba because Fidel Castro was a strongman that system put in place, who then turned right around and nationalized US holdings in Cuba and made Cuba independent.
So, you don't know exactly how it will go.
But if I had to make a prediction, right now, I would expect the US to continue as it currently is for at least a few more decades. It'll experience a gradual continued decline in quality of life (as has happened for decades already... as you note), before you have any real strongman attempts at establishing a monarchy. Things aren't bad enough in the US that people are ready to throw out the current system and follow a strong sole leader. The seeds are planted for it, though.
After that, who knows. Maybe you'll see the American Republic transform into an American Empire, the way Rome did. Rome had to go through several decades of pretty extreme public tumult and successive revolutions to get there, though.
@DarkKnight,
As far back as 2017/8, all my economist friends were predicting a massive recession sometime in 2020. I sold all my stocks in 2019 in anticipation of this (ultimately a mistake... but I didn't anticipate this whole bananas situation).
Zillow predicted a housing market collapse bigger than the 2008 collapse. It published data in late 2019 that showed this collapse in housing prices was underway. The same fundamental reasons were there... sub-prime mortgages being sold again, under a different name... overheated real estate market... etc.
All signs pointed to a big reckoning for Western economies in 2020. And at the same time Russia was squeezing the US in the Middle East. Donald Trump, the mortal enemy of this financial empire (they hated him even more than Russia or China), had declawed its Middle Eastern paws.
So no matter what, the West was poised to get its clocked cleaned economically in 2020.
When that happened, the already-restless peasants would've likely responded in a predictable way: fire and pitchforks aimed squarely at the elite.
But then -- COVID!
And everything has completely reversed.
Housing prices are through the roof. Stocks are through the roof. Everyone's getting rich -- except those poor sops dependent on paychecks.
Extreme measures 'necessitated' everyone being locked inside. Not one life could be lost for the economy. Sure, the economy had to suffer, massively, but it was for the greater good. It was wartime. And in wartime, people make sacrifices for neighbor and nation.
What you end up with is a controlled demolition of sections of the Western economies, that was likely to happen anyway. But, fortunately for those in power, rather than the Wall Street fat cats going broke and taxpayers having to bail them out again (which was what would've happened; this may well have collapsed the system), the Wall Street fat cats got richer. This time, rather than pay for bailouts, taxpayers simply got laid off from work and had their businesses closed.
The whole thing is a high wire act though. The Western system had no choice. If it didn't do what it's doing, it likely would've collapsed. Instead, it implodes part of the economy, transfers wealth from poorer to richer, and removes civil liberties to make resistance much harder, and it gets to stay stitched together a while longer.
But, meantime, yes, Russia's star is rising. China's star is rising. Other countries become increasingly more likely to peel out of the US orbit and defect to the Russian/Chinese orbit. If you're in the US orbit, you must implement all these weird "divide & conquer" social justice policies that are highly unpopular with the public, and you must allow the US all its economic privileges that don't serve your country so well.
This is why you see the US getting increasingly shrill about, say, stymying Nordstream 2 (German-Russian economic alliance), China's various Belt & Road initiatives, etc.
It's also why you see all these social media-coordinated (e.g., US-seeded/led) color revolutions all of a sudden in all these disparate countries. Either to put pressure on the main countries they're in the orbit of (the Belarus color revolution to pressure Russia; the Hong Kong color revolution to pressure China) or to flip insufficiently loyal states back to loyalty (Thailand, Myanmar, etc.).
Ultimately this sloppy, chaotic response, where Western governments must treat their subjects as prisoners, meanwhile saber rattling against the rest of the world and sparking color revolutions everywhere, is back-against-the-wall, sick/wounded old tiger behavior. And it is largely because of Donald Trump.
Hillary Clinton, in her presidential candidacy, made clear she was going to enforce a no-fly zone over Syria. No-fly zone = "we shoot down Russian planes" = "we are going to commit to regime change in Syria" = Iran is the only country left in the Middle East opposing US dollar hegemony, Russia is on its back heel, and the international banking empire is secure.
Trump got in and set to work deconstructing this stuff. It opened up a power vacuum for Russia to move in and push the US on the playing field. This is why the American system continually claimed Trump was "working for Russia." He wasn't actually, and if I had to guess probably didn't even understand the geopolitics he was messing around with. He just wanted to bring the troops home and end foreign entanglements. But the end result was the US financial empire took a big, potentially lethal hit, and allowed Russia to gain the momentum.
Meanwhile, at home, there has been a rising populist insurgency against the current regime. Both the populist left and the populist right feel like something is wrong and want to change the system. This is a fire burning right in the heart of the global financial empire. Trump took this smoldering camp fire and turned it into a raging forest fire.
Had Trump been defeated in 2016, the way Sanders was earlier that year, domestic populism would've been swept back under the rug for a time (to need to be dealt with later) and Russia would've been corralled. China, which doesn't like confrontation, would've seen all this and stuck to a softer tone.
Instead, the whole timeline got messed up, and the system is now in a flat-out panic.
This censorship stuff all started after the Trump win. They didn't do any of it before -- they didn't think they needed to. Broad, hurried, emotional censorship is always an admission you are losing the war for hearts and minds.
But the tl;dr is:
This international banking/financial empire was overconfident. It then lost full control over the US, its power center. This loss of control caused some big damage to its tight-but-delicate system of international control. The domestic response has been to lock down the people and elections inside the system to prevent further internal rebellion. Internationally, it has switched into overdrive trying to destabilize foreign powers, who can see this global financial empire has become weak and have become increasingly bold.
You can look at how the Russian and Chinese leaders/diplomats have spoken to and about the US government since the Biden regime took power. Putin called the US "Shere Khan" and its various helper countries "hyenas jumping around it" and threatened a "swift, asymmetric response" if Russia or its interests are attacked. Yang Jiechi, the Chinese Direct of Central Foreign Affairs Commission, told the US it is not in a position to talk down to China and had better watch its tone.
Neither China nor Russia have ever spoken to or about the US like this before. However, likewise, the US has never been nearly so belligerent and chaotic in its diplomacy as it is under this Biden regime.
But the US empire is locked into a path it has no way out of.
It must keep its people cowed, or else deal with full-on rebellion inside itself, which will collapse it.
It must keep its adversaries on their heels, or else deal with them biting off the organs of its financial empire, which, too, will collapse it.
It's really an unenviable position for any system to be in.
The only ways out at this point are probably either eventual collapse, or world war.
But who knows, maybe the elites still have some tricks up their sleeves.
Trump surprised them, but they got him out and regained control. I sure didn't see this COVID thing coming.
Chase