A grim view from the left

Here is a grim assessment of our plight by the indispensable Chris Hedges. Violence is heating up in failing states all across the globe. It will get much worse as the fatuous pretensions of governments are exposed and as their preposterous policies fail one after the other. The simple truth is that we have only one way to recover our prosperity: restore a genuinely productive private economy in a state with small, limited, frugal constitutional government and an honest, gold-backed currency. Fat chance that's going to happen! Governments everywhere intend to hang on to power by hook or by crook, by fear or by coercion, by truncheon or by bullet. That includes the federal, state, county, and city governments in America. That's why your local police force looks like a branch of the military nowadays. Under the guise of anti-terrorism, we've become a militarized, pseudo-civilian state. These quasi-military police forces will soon be deployed against domestic "terrorists" otherwise known as angry citizens marching--and probably rioting--in the streets. Remember the street violence of the Vietnam era and race riots like Watts way back in the 1960s? That past is our future.

However, we haven't yet suffered the violence now erupting in other countries because despair and desperation, although growing daily, have yet to reach a critical mass here. Citizens of other countries are fast losing whatever illusions they once held; stark reality can't be avoided there. In America the magical thinking that has dominated our civil life and led us to make borrow-and-spend a way of life is still hanging on in its final form--Obama optimism. "Yes, we can!" No, we won't, but cheerleading-as-governing needs a few more brutal months of butting up against an implacable reality of depression and impoverishment before we at last sober up and see how decades of government-countenanced looting and swindling have left us powerless to save ourselves from economic ruin.

Read it here