When the War Street Journal starts doing your heavy lifting for you, then it's probably a safe bet you're on the right track, at least as far as the most immediately agreed-upon-fit-for mass consumption "truth" goes. Like many things, I don't say this blindly but with real years of practical experience and knowledge gathered through research and study. Things are speeding up here towards the end of 2008 and the ominous predictions for 2009 don't give me much to hope for either.
Who you are and where you've been doesn't mean shit until the actual-factual meets the theoretical and the perceived in some sort of steel-cage deathmatch confrontation in your cerebral cortex. What you think and what you see can often times be completely different. Case in point: when I was in college, I had the good fortune to meet and socialise regularly with a man whose personal fortune was somewhere north of $600 or $700 Million dollars, in 1990s money not the over-inflated Greenspan money market world of too-cheap credit and zero loan qualifications for illegal immigrants. My friend, if you were to see him on the street, wouldn't raise the slightest bit of interest from thieves or paparazzi, and although he didn't dress like a slob, far from it, but he wasn't wearing a ton of bling or diamond encrusted Rolex or expensive tailored suits, either. Although he could afford any luxury sedan or sports car known to man, he drove a 1982 Mercedes Benz diesel with something like 170K miles on it.
When I first met him, it was in his reasonably appointed 2-bedroom condo near Westwood, and over the next 4 or 6 months we would either meet there or at a local restaurant. Discovering the extent of his wealth was quite a shock, to say the very least.
One day, however, he said that the building management was repainting and recarpeting the floors and hallways outside his flat and would we mind picking him up at his house. House? I'm thinking, "What house?!?" Yeah yeah, no worries, we'll come and get you. Now, keep in mind that this way back in the godless 1990s, before the ubiquity of cellphones, $49.00 handheld GPS satellite-fed mapping systems, and Google Maps, when you had to physically own a paper map of some value and actually be able to read the damned thing.
For people in Los Angeles and most large west coast urban centers, the answer was usually a Thomas Brothers Map, complete with a street index with print so small you'd go blind just looking at the damned thing. After we matched up the address to the grid coordinates and page numbers like we were calling in field artillery, we noticed that the house was located on a page that was solid green with a red line running through the middle of it, a canyon of enormous proportions. By the time we rolled into the long circular driveway, it was all starting to make sense. This guy had M-o-n-e-y kind of money and he wasn't socially retarded, a drunk or a drug-addict or someone you'd otherwise want to avoid because or their spoiled, petulant behavior. As we sat sipping Cokes (the really sweet ones in bottles from Mexico that weren't made with HFCS - yum!) in the library looking at his collection of first editions I suddenly realised that people with money, especially lots and lots of it, can make you believe any damned thing they want you to believe, at least in the short run.
However, as history has shown time and again, The Truth will always find a way to wiggle its way out and into the sunlight. My point of mentioning my friend was to illustrate what now is the obvious: perception really is not reality in most situations.
The people who run the WSJ and the stock markets of the global economy are very wealthy indeed, (although I suspect much of their fortunes has disappeared down the Bernie Maddoff rathole,) and one thing that is consistent about this Old-Money is that these people do not lose. They may get setbacks that would cripple or destroy the likes of you and me, but pish-posh, that's the type of worrying that kept your ancestors in the trees picking ticks off one another while theirs had conquered much of Eurasia. These people do not lose, historically, for very long, and when they do lose, say, an entire Empire-conquest like the Continental United States in 1776-1791 they take it very fucking poorly (see War of 1812, boiled steak, and The Spice Girls, all obvious revenge attacks against the moral underpinnings and the dental and dietary superiority of the "colonists.") And then they get us all addicted to the Beatles and the Led Zeppelin and the Monty Python and the James Bond and the Aston Martins and Page 6 Girls. Lousy buggers!
Now, having said all of that, here is what the Anglo-American Empire builders of the last 4 centuries have had to say recently, and this column in particular has been linked to numerous sites and has sparked some fairly lively debate in the comments section.
Mr. Panarin posits, in brief, that mass immigration, economic decline, and moral degradation will trigger a civil war next fall and the collapse of the dollar. Around the end of June 2010, or early July, he says, the U.S. will break into six pieces -- with Alaska reverting to Russian control.
Now, as this former KGB-type begins to list his reasons of why this collapse could happen and when, I am reminded of the time when another former KGB-type told me (in mid-1990) that the Soviet Union would collapse, America and Russia would act like old friends for awhile, and then things would get back to business as usual among the criminal-political classes of both countries. That prediction seems right on the money, pardon the pun, because when the former president and CEO of GoldmanSucks is named the Treasury Secretary and he's allowed to bail his friends out and use government to eliminate his corporate competitors (Lehman, Bear Stearns) you had better fucking believe it: these people are not in the business of losing, and when it comes to collecting their "touch" it won't matter whether it's from your local bank or your local industry's main employer, Uncle Scam, they will get their due. Just watch the "Sopranos" in the first or 2nd season when Tony and his goons take over that guy's sporting goods store because he can't cover his gambling debts to the mob gamers he's into for some money to watch a good illustration of what I'm talking about.
The only difference will be that instead of some stupid, sweaty Guido with a junkie-whore girlfriend rolling through your hood in their stolen Range Rover, it may very well be a German or Congolese division of troops of a United Nations "peace-keeping" force in tanks and armored personnel carriers (APCs) with very large guns sent here to quell the riots and civil unrest you've all heard so much about here and elsewhere. When the creditors, namely the Chinese, the Dutch, the Brits, the Germans, who have been buying our debt and keeping our currency and economy afloat and the greater portions of the sub-Saharan African continent and the Middle East who have been living off of our foreign aid checks for the last 50 years suddenly realise we can't cover the ante, do you honestly believe that they'll behave like good little Christian American tax payers and just roll over when the gravy train suddenly stops? Do you honestly believe for one second that these people will just turn their heads, shrug their shoulders and walk away from Trillions of dollars of American debt that they are owed? PLEASE!
They aren't stupid American tax payers like you and me. When Brazil and Argentina's economies disintegrated in the 1980s, the US forgave billions of dollars in their debt. The list of Eastern European countries whose debt we've also forgiven recently is staggering as well. At the end of WWII, after liberating all of Europe from the hands of one A. Hitler, do you know how many thankful, gracious, welcoming countries in Europe repaid their war debts to Uncle Sucker? Do you?
Come on now, here's your chance to impress me with your 4th-world education and rote memorization drills "taught" to you in government (aka "public") schools throughout the US. Well?
One: Finland. So, in my opinion, any time you meet someone, any one from say Helsinki, buy the man (or better yet woman, 'cuz the Finnish women are the hot!) a drink, stat. Or some reindeer jerky, I hear they like that as well.
He predicts that economic, financial and demographic trends will provoke a political and social crisis in the U.S. When the going gets tough, he says, wealthier states will withhold funds from the federal government and effectively secede from the union. Social unrest up to and including a civil war will follow. The U.S. will then split along ethnic lines, and foreign powers will move in.
When the Going Gets Tough? Who does this guy think he is, Will Rogers? Oh wait, he's the same Soviet analyst who predicted the USSR going bye bye right before it did. The drumbeat of gloom and doom is steadily growing louder, and not from just the usual suspects. When the monied classes start to panic and show their hand in public, you can damn well bet that their players know when to hold 'em and know when to fold 'em.
Do you?
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