Tag: American Decline

Guest Post by Pat Buchanan

Will this pandemic prove the decisive factor in America’s retreat from global hegemony?

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For declaring in March that the U.S. economy might be reopened by Easter, President Donald Trump was roundly mocked.

Yet, it appears his political instincts were correct. He was more in tune with his country than were his critics.

By early Easter week, Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the governors of six states in the New York-New Jersey region had formed a consortium to synchronize the opening of their economies. California’s Gavin Newsom and the governors of Washington and Oregon had done the same.

The governors may disagree on the timing, May 1 or May 15, but most agree with Trump. America cannot remain shut down for months without lasting damage to the livelihood and lives of millions of citizens who are about to be shoved into a new Great Depression.

Twenty-two million Americans are now unemployed.

Continue reading “Will COVID-19 Retire the World’s Policeman?”

Guest Post by Martin Armstrong

The economy like a man seated on a rock among fallen trees in a forest with his chin propped up by his arm resting on his thigh, while high overhead the wind of change blew breaking the tops of the trees as they fell to the ground. He sat on the top of a hill, once the citadel of the modern world, where so many foreign dignitaries once came to pay their homage. The Congressional Hall, once bustling with lobbyists all vying for favors in return for bribes, remained empty, a mere shadow of its former glory.

Continue reading “The Fate of All Nations”

Guest Post by Jim Kunstler

The ruins of Mary McClellan Hospital stand on hill overlooking the village of Cambridge, New York, in what was a “flyover” corner of the country until the planes stopped flying. The hospital cornerstone was laid July 4 1917. The USA had entered the war against Germany a few months earlier. The “Spanish” flu pandemic kicked off in January, 1918.  The hospital opened in January 1919. The flu burned out a year later. The hospital shut down for good in 2003.

I’ve lived around here for decades and never actually got a look at the place until I went up there on a blustery spring Saturday before Easter to look around. I like to read landscapes and the human imprint upon them. This one is a ghost story, not just of the bygone souls who came and went here, but of an entire society, the nation that we used to be and stopped being not so long ago.

Continue reading “Ruin Nation”

Guest Post by Martin Armstrong

It is absolutely insane what the government has done to the economy. Bank of America says 85,000 small businesses have asked for $22.2 billion in loans since 9 am. Meanwhile, Google has come to the aid of the Democrats and is allowing them to run Coronavirus Advertisements to further harm the economy and to blame every death on Trump. They are using this to simply win an election with no regard for the well being of people or the economy. Everyone is ignoring the fact that Italy even topped-out on March 20th. We may still see a peak in the USA next week.

Continue reading “Can the United States Survive this Political Hatred?”

Guest Post by Simon Black

In the year 1520, exactly 500 years ago, a German scholar named Johan Schoner completed a map of the world that was widely considered to be humanity’s most advanced understanding of geography at that time.

To us, Schoner’s map is pretty amusing.

There’s scarcely any American continent. Instead he drew some amorphous blobs to mark Brazil and the ‘West Indies’. And there’s a very narrow body of water where the Pacific Ocean is supposed to be, separating Brazil and India.

Obviously we know this is totally wrong. But it was science’s best understanding of the world in 1520.

Then, in 1529, a Venetian named Giovanni Ramusio created an updated map based on the various explorations and discoveries throughout the 1520s.

Ramusio’s map shows the eastern coastline of North and South America, from Newfoundland to the tip of Argentina, and the west coast from Peru through Mexico, with incredible precision and accuracy.

Continue reading “When the world became unrecognizable in less than a decade”

Authored by Michael Snyder via TheMostImportantNews.com,

One thing that you can count on in life is that things are going to change. And these days the pace of change in America is absolutely breathtaking. Our culture is in the process of being radically transformed, and the direction of that change has not altered very much at all no matter which political party has been in power in Washington. Many of the values that are now embraced by a solid majority of the population run directly counter to the values that once dominated our society, but only a small minority of Americans seem alarmed by that fact. It appears to be exceedingly unlikely that there will be any deviating from the path that our nation has chosen, because at this point the American people seem quite satisfied with the dramatic “progress” that is taking place.

So what do you think?

Continue reading “This Is America: 10 Examples That Show How Dramatically The U.S. Has Changed”

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

Here is hollowed-out America, an economy of ever-greater financial wealth piling up in the hands of the few while tens of millions of wage-earners can’t afford what was available to everyone, even the working class, in previous eras.

America is being hollowed out, but since we don’t measure what actually matters, the decline has been deep-sixed by the government and media. As I explain in my new book Will You Be Richer or Poorer?, there are a number of reasons why what’s important –social capital, for example–doesn’t get measured.

Continue reading “The Hollowing Out Of America”

Guest Post by Jim Kunstler

Here’s one big reason that America is driving itself batshit crazy: the explosion of computerized records, emails, inter-office memos, Twitter trails, Facebook memorabilia, iPhone videos, YouTubes, recorded conversations, and the vast alternative universe of storage capacity for all this stuff makes it seem possible to constantly go back and reconstruct reality. All it has really done is amplified the potential for political mischief to suicide level.

Continue reading “The Fatal Loop of Recursivity”

Hat tip David E.

Guest Post by Boyd Cathey

There is a question that increasingly arises, uncomfortably, in our conversations…from brief exchanges at work at the water cooler, at home with family, after church on Sunday, with our email messages to friends and associates. To watch any amount of television news these days, to switch back and forth between, say, CNN and Fox, and to listen to their interpretations of any event or issue, no matter what, that same question clambers in the background like an unchained wild beast:

What has happened—what is happening—to the geographical entity we call the United States, to its people, to its culture? Does it not seem like the country is coming apart at the seams, in just about everything, from its once-established moral base in a more or less historic Christian framework to its very vision of reality, of what is real and what is not?

Continue reading “Is It Time for America to Break Apart?”

Guest Post by Jim Kunstler

“American exceptionalism has led to a country that is exceptionally un-self-aware.” — Peter Thiel

The economic contraction ahead will put this borderline psychotic country through some interesting ch-ch-ch-changes. Mr. Trump now fully owns the Potemkin status quo of record stock markets poised against a withering rot of human capital at the core of an industrial society in sunset mode. Leadership at every corner of American life — politics, business, media — expects an ever-higher tech magical updraft of fortune from an increasingly holographic economy of mere fugitive appearances in which everybody can get more of something for nothing. The disappointment over how all this works out will be epic.

Continue reading “Things to Come”

Guest Post by Paul Craig Roberts

The Democrats are even more insane than I thought.  The Trump-hater Nadler had a press conference with other Trump-hating Democrats and claimed, despite the absence of any evidence from Mueller, that Trump is a criminal.  Reassured by this certitude, the Democrats will continue their impeachment investigation, says Nadler.

Continue reading “Americans Are Consigning Themselves to the Trash Bin of History”

Via Pew Research

Majorities predict a weaker economy, a growing income divide, a degraded environment and a broken political system

(Rachel Black/EyeEm/Getty Images)

When Americans peer 30 years into the future, they see a country in decline economically, politically and on the world stage. While a narrow majority of the public (56%) say they are at least somewhat optimistic about America’s future, hope gives way to doubt when the focus turns to specific issues.

A new Pew Research Center survey focused on what Americans think the United States will be like in 2050 finds that majorities of Americans foresee a country with a burgeoning national debt, a wider gap between the rich and the poor and a workforce threatened by automation.

Majorities predict that the economy will be weaker, health care will be less affordable, the condition of the environment will be worse and older Americans will have a harder time making ends meet than they do now. Also predicted: a terrorist attack as bad as or worse than 9/11 sometime over the next 30 years.

Continue reading “Looking to the Future, Public Sees an America in Decline on Many Fronts”