Say what you will about the Russians, there are no people on earth with a better knowledge of how empires collapse; so when two Russian experts, independently of each other, say that the United States is on the verge of collapsing -- well, maybe we should listen to what they have to say.
The Drudge Report cites Professor Igor Panarin of the Diplomatic Academy of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in an interview with Izvestia. When asked when the U.S. economy would collapse, Panarin said: "It is already collapsing. Due to the financial crisis, three of the largest and oldest five banks on Wall Street have already ceased to exist, and two are barely surviving. Their losses are the biggest in history. Now what we will see is a change in the regulatory system on a global financial scale: America will no longer be the world's financial regulator."
Asked why he expected the U.S. to break up into separate parts, he said: "A whole range of reasons. Firstly, the financial problems in the U.S. will get worse. Millions of citizens there have lost their savings. Prices and unemployment are on the rise. General Motors and Ford are on the verge of collapse, and this means that whole cities will be left without work. Governors are already insistently demanding money from the federal center. Dissatisfaction is growing, and at the moment it is only being held back by the elections and the hope that Obama can work miracles. But by spring, it will be clear that there are no miracles." He also cited the "vulnerable political setup", "lack of unified national laws", and "divisions among the elite, which have become clear in these crisis conditions."
The other is economist Dmitry Orlov, cited in the Campaign for Liberty blog, who identifies five stages of collapse: financial, commercial, political, social, and cultural. In the financial collapse phase, credit dries up, savings are wiped out, and frantic efforts to save solvency with liquidity cause hyperinflation. He takes for granted, reasonably enough, that the United States is well into this first stage already. In the next two stages, which Mr. Orlov asserts are totally unavoidable, supplies dry up (from lack of money, comes lack of products) and political corruption runs more rampant than ever. Both stages driven by financial collapse, he says, they will overlap, and it isn't clear which will begin sooner. "With the disappearance of the free and open market, even the items that still are available for sale come to be offered in a way that is neither free nor open, but only at certain times and to certain people. Whatever wealth still exists is hidden, because flaunting it or exposing it just increases the security risk, and the amount of effort required to guard it."
Mr. Orlov says that political collapse is hard to spot because "the worse things get, the more noise the politicians emit. The substance to noise ratio in political discourse is pretty low even in good times, making it hard to spot the transition when it actually drops to zero." The variable that's easier to monitor is the level of political embarrassment. He cites the example of Mr. Nazdratenko, the governor of the far-east Russian region of Primorye, who stole large amounts of coal, made strides in the direction of establishing an independent foreign policy toward China, and yet Moscow could do nothing to rein him in, you could be sure that Russia's political system was pretty much defunct."
So, as V.I. Lenin famously asked, "What is to be done?" Mr. Orlov argues elsewhere that Russians, who housed three generations accustomed to hardship under one roof, were actually better prepared for collapse than Americans, who live alone or in nuclear families, spread out geographically. Where the Russian attitude was "life goes ever on," we will find ourselves stranded among strangers. To prevent this social collapse, "[the] only reasonable approach, it seems to me, is to form communities that are strong and cohesive enough to provide for the well-being of all of their members, that are large enough to be resourceful, yet small enough so that people can relate to each other directly, and to take direct responsibility for each other's well-being. Do you think your web-based communities will ever be able to perform these functions? Please, stop dreaming. "
And what of the political collapse? Orlov says that this is when local politics will matter the most. The federal government will be deaf as ever to the public outcry, but municipalities will feel the distress as roads, sewer mains, and the like can no longer be maintained.
In other words, the only government that will matter will be that which is closest to us, which is the essence of decentralism.
Virtual buckeyes to Mike Tuggle at Rebellion and Path I've Made at Ohio Freedom Alliance.
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