https://tinyurl.com/yd8bm6dq
The Coming Collaps
We must invest our energy in building parallel, popular institutions to
protect ourselves and to pit power against power. These parallel institutions,
including unions, community development organizations, local currencies,
alternative political parties and food cooperatives, will have to be
constructed town by town. The elites in a time of distress will retreat to
their gated compounds and leave us to fend for ourselves. Basic services, from
garbage collection to public transportation, food distribution and health
care, will collapse. Massive unemployment and underemployment, triggering
social unrest, will be dealt with not through government job creation but the
brutality of militarized police and a complete suspension of civil liberties.
.. The dollar will stop being the world’s reserve currency, causing a steep
devaluation. Banks will close. Global warming will extract heavier and heavier
costs, especially on the coastal populations, farming and the infrastructure,
costs that the depleted state will be unable to address. The corporate press,
like the ruling elites, will go from burlesque to absurdism, its rhetoric so
patently fictitious it will, as in all totalitarian states, be unmoored from
reality. ..
It is impossible for any doomed population to grasp how fragile the decayed
financial, social and political system is on the eve of implosion. All the
harbingers of collapse are visible: crumbling infrastructure; chronic
underemployment and unemployment; the indiscriminate use of lethal force by
police; political paralysis and stagnation; an economy built on the
scaffolding of debt; nihilistic mass shootings in schools, universities,
workplaces, malls, concert venues and movie theaters; opioid overdoses that
kill some 64,000 people a year; an epidemic of suicides; unsustainable
military expansion; gambling as a desperate tool of economic development and
government revenue; the capture of power by a tiny, corrupt clique;
censorship; the physical diminishing of public institutions ranging from
schools and libraries to courts and medical facilities; the incessant
bombardment by electronic hallucinations to divert us from the depressing
sight that has become America and keep us trapped in illusions. We suffer the
usual pathologies of impending death. ..
...