- Letters To My Son...
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- My dear Muhammad Ali -
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- I told you that it's a funny world getting funnier. Many
American analysts are saying that America's real economic collapse could
come by the end of this year. "It will come to known as The Crash
of 09," they say. Others, especially a Russian political analyst,
are predicting its physical collapse too. There's no doubt that the country
is up the dirtiest of imaginable creeks without a paddle. But what's amazing
is that America remains mired in stunning denial, continuing to make bad
situations worse with useless bailout plans and messing around with the
world instead of facing up to the reality that its time as a hyper-power
is up, that's its economic system has failed and that its only recourse
is to end its adversarial doctrine and get out of its lost wars as painlessly
and honorably as possible. There's no point in going on flogging dead horses.
The only sensible thing that survival demands is to craft a new moral economic
and financial system and a moral foreign policy.
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- The deep recession verging on depression that we have
seen so far was caused by the crash in the US housing market. Since other
developed industrialized nations, especially of Europe, were aping the
shenanigans of unchecked and poorly regulated American bankers and financiers,
the collapse of their markets, banks and economies followed like dominoes.
Iceland was the first to officially declare bankruptcy. Its GDP is only
about $6.5 billion but its banks had lent something like $65 billion while
its regulators were asleep on the wheel. Britain has not declared bankruptcy
officially but we all know that it is bankrupt for all intents and purposes
and none of its banks and financial institutions has any legs left.
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- However, this is only the aperitif. Wait for the crash
of US commercial real estate, which analysts think happen by autumn this
year. Shops are closing down and there's no one to rent them. Companies
are retrenching and freeing up a lot of office space or closing down entirely
and vacating even more precious office space with no one to rent it again.
Huge skyscrapers are becoming ghost-scrapers. All this expensive commercial
real estate is mortgaged to the hilt. With no rental income coming in,
the loans against them will become difficult to service and there will
be fearsome default. There's insurance and re-insurance here also and the
amounts involved are mind-boggling. No bailout plan would come even close
to coping. When the commercial real estate collapse comes, all hell will
break loose. And if multinationals like General Motors and Ford call it
a day, it won't just be thousands upon thousands of people unemployed (though
its heartless to use the word 'just' here). Two entire towns will be become
ghost towns. That's terrible. If you count the number of people wives,
children and parents who are dependent on those incomes, it becomes
worse than terrible. It becomes absolutely and totally unconscionable,
while corrupt and greedy bankers and the likes of Bernie Madoff have made
off with billions perhaps trillions of dollars and are still
doing so because "our contracts say so."
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- Then there is Professor Igor Nikolavich Panarin whom
I came across in a December 2008 article by Andrew Osborne of the Wall
Street Journal no less, not some fly-by-night rag. If he has got it right,
next year will come to be known as 'The Collapse of 2010' for that is when
the USA will disintegrate into six separate entities. Those six entities,
says Prof. Panarin, are The California Republic, The Central North American
Republic, Atlantic America, The Texas Republic, Hawaii and Alaska going
back to Russia.
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- With millions of Chinese living on America's western
seaboard (The People's Daily's circulation there alone is over five million)
The California Republic, Prof. Panarin thinks, will either be part of China
or come under Chinese influence. The Central North American Republic will
be part of Canada or under Canadian influence, Atlantic America may join
the European Union, The Texas Republic will be part of Mexico or under
Mexican influence and Hawaii will go either to Japan or China.
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- Prof. Panarin is a former KGB analyst and a Russian professor
of political science, Dean of the Ministry of the Foreign Affairs Diplomatic
Academy in Moscow and author of several books on geopolitics. Thus one
can hardly call him a fruitcake. Actually, he first made this prediction
not after the economic meltdown that started last year but in Linz, Austria,
in September 1998 in front of 400 delegates at a conference devoted to
information warfare and the use of data to get an edge over a rival. Of
course it was received with consternation. "When I pushed the button
on my computer and the map of the United States disintegrated, hundreds
of people cried out in surprise," he says. Later, many delegates asked
him to sign copies of the map. Its like when the French political scientist
Emmanuel Todd made his famous forecast in 1976 about the collapse of the
Soviet Union 15 years before it actually did and many people laughed. But
Todd had the last laugh.
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- Prof. Panarin doesn't say that America's collapse is
a forgone conclusion. "There's a 55-45 percent chance right now that
disintegration will occur," he says. But if it comes it will be driven
by three factors "mass immigration, economic decline and moral
degradation will trigger a civil war next fall and the collapse of the
dollar. Around the end of June 2010, or early July, he says, the US will
break into six piecesHe predicts that economic, financial and demographic
trends will provoke a political and social crisis in the US. When the going
gets tough, he says, wealthier states will withhold funds from the federal
government and effectively secede from the Union. Social unrest up to and
including a civil war will follow. The US will then split along ethnic
lines, and foreign powers will move in." All we Pakistanis thus have
to do is hang in there and soon America will not be meddling in our affairs
any more, what to talk of General Patraeus's adviser David Kilcullen saying
that Pakistan could fall apart in five or six months.
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- It's not easy to comprehend the collapse of an empire
or a superpower. When termites are eating away at their vitals for years
one cannot see it. People are too much in thrall of their power, wealth
and panoply. Thus when the collapse comes it seems sudden, and takes people
by surprise. "I went to sleep last night and when I woke up next morning
the Soviet Union was gone." The most powerful war machine ever built
couldn't save it. Remember the British Empire on which "the sun would
never set"? It set so firmly that only six decades later Britain is
not only bankrupt, it has become America's appendage, a third rate power
and could itself disintegrate soon with Scotland seceding. The history
of the world is replete with the demise of civilizations, empires and superpowers.
The graveyards of nations are full of their bones.
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- That there may be something to what Prof. Panarin says
is borne out by the fact that the late Bush administration made contingency
plans to impose martial law in case of economic collapse or massive and
violent social unrest with blood on the streets. His predictions seem plausible,
even probable, if all the dire scenarios come right, as they have thus
far. According to Rand Clifford the US has already made plans to "round
up insurgent US citizens" and detain them in what are called "Rex
84" camps. Plus they have made "safe facilities" for members
of Congress and their families. A report by the Phoenix Business Journal
says that, "A new report by the US Army and War College talks about
the possibility of Pentagon resources and troops being used should the
economic crisis lead to civil unrest, such as protests against businesses
and government or runs on beleaguered banks." The Journal's story
quote from the War College report: "Widespread civil violence inside
the United States would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities
in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security." It
needs saying that the military regularly makes plans for the most dire
of situations, however seemingly unlikely.
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- Let Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Advisor
to President Jimmy Carter and an early supporter of Barack Obama have the
last word. The US is "going to have millions and millions of unemployed
people really facing dire straits. And we're going to be having that for
some period of time before things hopefully improve. And at the same time
there's public awareness of this extraordinary wealth that was transferred
to a few individuals at levels without historical precedent in Americahell
there could even be riots."
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- humayun.gauhar@gmail.com
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- http://www.nation.com.pk/pakistan-news-newspaper-daily-english-
- online/Opinions/Columns/05-Apr-2009/The-crash-of-09-the-collapse-of-10/
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