[Jack Black]

Money Quote: "The reason Washington is likely to fail is really the same reason that Moscow failed which is runaway debt and national bankruptcy. "

The above is a transcript of an interview that Orlov did with The Nation magazine (a very leftist publication).

If you prefer the video link of the interview it is here.

He has written a book on this topic:

[RJR_fan]

ping

[dragnet2]

The U.S. will collapse, when the U.S. government figures out the private sector is broke, and can no longer support tens of hundreds of thousands of government employees and their lottery style retirement benefits...

It's coming. Bet the rent.

[ml/nj]

Interesting article from a USSR refugee. My experience is that such people can teach us a lot. This is a long article so I've pulled some quotes which I think are insightful, and a couple which are not. I've added a few comments in italics.

As long as people think that there’s something in it for them, they will cooperate. As soon as they decide that there is nothing in it for them, they will cease to cooperate and the system starts to crumble, cave in on itself.

The reason I started talking about this is because I was, frankly, very worried about the United States because I saw the United States as not nearly as well prepared for collapse as the Soviet Union. You see, the Russian people never had a great deal of faith in their government or in the system, so they grew and gathered a lot of their own food.

In the case of the Russians it turned out that money was borderline irrelevant for a lot of things that people needed to survive. That’s what allowed them to survive. That’s not the case here, and its time to get very worried about that.

The five stages of collapse

Here I think he misses what I fear. What I fear is that they stop delivering food to the Shop-Rite.

I think what’s going to happen is the dissolution of the United States as a political and economic entity. It will more or less fade from the world scene in the same way that the Soviet Union faded from the world scene. Parts of it will later be reborn as something that we might have a lot more trouble imagining because there isn’t something called Russia that part of the Soviet Union. There isn’t something similar to that in the United States. It’s really a bunch of territories, very disjointed territories held together by Washington. So if Washington fails then it’s not clear what is going to hold these territories together.

The American “corporatocracy” is very much into just in time delivery and everything is network based and that makes it extremely fragile and I don’t see that pattern holding.

Now the reason we have agriculture is because we’ve had ten thousand years of stable climate, which seems to have ended.

I think the idea that we, in the short time we are given on earth, can observe climate change is absurd. Yeah it's colder here in NJ this winter. We have more snow. But stuff will be growing again in May, just like always, for us anyway.

We don’t get to decide how many people survive all we get to do is you know, try to survive, and find ways to do it.

We don’t need scientists to tell us that. I’ve been living in New England for decades now and I’m used to the ocean being cold. So if in the middle of the summer I jump in the ocean and its body temperature you don’t have to be a scientist to tell me that something is going very strangely here. You know, it’s really quite obvious. People who are a little bit more in tune with the elements, people who have spent a lot of time outdoors, you can talk to them. Very few of them will tell you that, oh this is nothing out of the ordinary, this is the usual thing. So we’re in for a great deal of climate upheaval.

More climate insanity. I just cannot imagine that if you jump into the ocean in Maine, that it's like jumping into the Dead Sea (which is really bath-water warm in the summer). I'm not there so I don't really know. But the water temperatures in Maine depend much more upon ocean currents than the local climate.

"Climate change" did not bring down the Soviet Union.

ML/NJ

[sergeantdave]

This idiot doesn’t have a clue. Trying to compare the experience of Russia’s collapse and overlaying that to what will happen to America is absurd. The character of the Russian people, beaten down by decades of totalitarianism and dependence, is completely different from the character of the American people.

America could completely collapse tomorrow. The next day you’d see trading begin, followed by nascent local governmental organizations, community self-defense and the start of millions of small businesses filling needs.

And there’s no reason on earth that existing states couldn’t fill many of those primary steps to rebuild. Calling a states’ convention 6 months after a federal government collapse to establish a constitutional government would be a logical possibility.

Even after the South collapsed after the Civil War, the area was on the road to recovery by 1872.

Americans ain’t Russians. Period.

[Mamzelle]

I wish he’d put that bit about drowning in the tundra at the beginning, because he lost all cred for me at that point.

[Bigun]

Late to the party for sure but I'm going to say that, from the beginning, the ONLY thing that propped the Soviet Union up was The United States of America!

[Bigun]

Late to the party for sure but I'm going to say that, from the beginning, the ONLY thing that propped the Soviet Union up was The United States of America!