before<\/em> the pandemic hit, a catastrophe that has added almost all third-world and a few developed countries to that list.<\/p>\nBut the really interesting case of political collapse is right here. The inability of our political institutions to cope with the coronavirus for a year, and the spread now at record levels, and then the inability of the nation to hold an election without at least the strong suspicion of fraud, has certainly undercut a confidence in national government that has grown increasingly meager in the last few decades anyway. In the Wall Street Journal recently Gerald Seib pointed out that \u201cthis year\u2019s election can be seen as the culmination of a two-decade period of decline in faith in the basic building blocks of democracy\u201d\u2014quite an obituary for a system once happy to proclaim its virtues around the world.<\/p>\n
Add to that a general feeling that the Federal government just isn\u2019t working, or as the Pew Research people put it, only 17 per cent of Americans trust the government \u201cto do the right thing just about always.\u201d It seems clear that loyalty to a cause or a race or an ideology is far greater than loyalty to the state, no longer quite seen as legitimate, and many commentators these days suggest that some form of separation, even a civil war, is inevitable. Political collapse, then, if not here would seem to be just around the corner.<\/p>\n
And lastly the underlying depression that we have been in since March\u2014despite the frantic gyrations of a central bank-fueled stock market\u2014is just one sign that the American economy, like those of most of the Western world, is foundering. And no wonder: it is straining under the weight of a national debt of at least $27 trillion and national unfunded liabilities of more than $100 trillion, with a GDP of just $21 trillion to manage it with. But we have plenty of company\u2014the world\u2019s debt was a staggering $258 trillion at the start of the pandemic, some 320 per cent bigger than the world\u2019s GDP, meaning we\u2019re all living in a pipe dream unable to pay the piper.<\/p>\n
And there\u2019s still a few days left in a year that has exposed the weaknesses of the world system as never before.<\/p>\n\n
This post was originally published on Radio Free<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Abandoned passenger train car, Astoria, Oregon. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair. Twenty-five years ago, when the high-tech Second Industrial Revolution had just begun, I made a bet with an\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":379,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,266,4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3819"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/379"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3819"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3819\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3820,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3819\/revisions\/3820"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3819"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3819"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3819"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}