These all-too-interesting times are threatening to mutate into global mayhem. Because the usual 500-word commentary cannot begin to cover it all, let me list just a few of the things that we should all find troubling domestically and abroad:
• The subjugation of Iraq by jihadi madmen so deranged, cruel and violent that even al Qaeda considers them outcasts is about to radically reshape the geopolitical world. They now control territory from Aleppo in northwestern Syria to Fallujah in central Iraq and are fixing to extend their dominion – and a re-nascent Caliphate — to Baghdad. We should wish Iranian troops well in killing as many of them as possible.
• Whatever develops in Iraq, energy prices are poised to take a leap that could easily tip the developed world back into deepest, darkest recession. My technical forecast has been calling for $119-a-barrel crude, but that may prove to be just the booster stage of a much bigger rally.
• Under the breathtakingly inept leadership of Barack Obama, whose competence never rose above the demands of neighborhood rabble-rouser, America’s withdrawal from the world’s trouble spots threatens to end the Pax Americana that deepened its roots, if only briefly, following the demolition of the Berlin Wall.
• Question to the State Department, Western Europe, the neo-Nazi right and the American left: Do you still believe that Israel is the main cause of the world’s problems? For a dose of reality, read this prescient 1992 article by Angelo M. Codevilla in Middle East Quarterly.
• Waiting in the wings to make things worse is Hillary Clinton, as sinister as Obama is inept. The faked smile that hides her take-no-prisoners ruthlessness reminds me of the murderously ambitious Angela Lansbury character in The Manchurian Candidate.
• However the White House tries to spin the Bergdahl swap, the photo images of the five jihadi psychopaths released from Gitmo have already seared a terrifying image into the minds of Americans that will continue to haunt us.
• A lazy, ignorant, ideologically compromised news media that has kissed Obama’s feet since he announced his candidacy in 2007 is about to get its comeuppance when the true, rebellious feelings of Americans surface at the polls in November.
• No matter how much Hillary, Obama, Kerry and their lackeys in the press want Benghazi to go away, it will not.
• And neither will a dozen other scandals. If they appear to recede from concern for a while, it’s only because new and even bigger scandals are erupting every week.
• Lois Lerner’s emails have somehow gotten lost? This is the sort of thing that made beheadings so popular during the French Revolution.
• Obamacare is a dead duck. And don’t expect Americans to trust the same Federal Government that excreted it to “fix it” with a single-payer system. By now, most Americans understand that the single-payer model is just a load of leftist claptrap that would make the VA hospitals look like models of efficiency.
• The only way back for our Obama-wrecked healthcare system is for doctors to take matters into their own hands, marching on Washington if they have to.
• Still not convinced Obamacare will be derailed? Wait till you see what happens to insurance premiums – not just this year and next, when the increases will be merely stunning, but after The Guvmint’s ‘corridor’ subsidy is withdrawn at the end of 2017, subjecting rate payers to the full brunt of insurers’ mounting losses. By then, almost no one but the very well employed will be able to afford health insurance. To make matters worse, there will be more uninsured Americans than before Obamacare.
• The public-spirited PTA of the 1950s is about to revive, catalyzed by an increasingly hated Common Core program that would turn children into docile, ignorant Obama-ites.
• Student loans now tally $1.4 trillion and will never be repaid. This economic disaster-in-the-making will reach critical mass before Obama leaves office. Wage garnishments have already begun, dooming whatever hopes twenty-somethings had to climb out of the deepening abyss of post-collegiate poverty and The Great Recession.
Rick, you mentioned Flint and Detroit in a comment above and having lived both of those experiences from the 50’s through the 90’s I couldn’t agree more with your observations. The hyperinflation crowd’s notion that bales of money are going to be created is dubious and if currency could actually repair the entropy we’d have to come up with a new physics.
I visited the Whole Foods in Detroit’s Midtown area a couple times since it opened last year. It’s in a narrow corridor of development from Wayne State University and the Medical Center down to the riverfront. Two miles east, three miles north and three miles northwest and you’re in the three top most dangerous neighborhoods in the United States for violent crime.
Midtown is an island. Another iteration of re-development schemes going back the Renaissance Center and later casino and sport complexes. Talk about bread and circuses. Most of the people I meet here in Texas, outside of a few long-haul truck drivers, haven’t got a clue about it. The most common image I encounter is how Detroit’s a budding artist’s haven and flourishing urban-garden area. Pastel propaganda imho. Governor Snyder is reaching out to China in many ways and they’re responding.
It will be interesting to see how amenable Chinese investors are to the implications of the enormous infrastructural deficit including water, sewer and power. Not so much the investors purchasing blocks of houses sight unseen, but the ones buying warehouses and old manufacturing buildings. I wonder how thoroughly they’ve looked under the hood. The Potemkin Village aspect of Midtown could be sufficient to fool even savvy Chinese planners. It’s all there in the DSWD financial statements, or is it?
Delinquencies on water bills are now $175,000,000 across 165,000 accounts. These include businesses. The social impact of cutting off water to users 60 days or $150 in arrears is unknowable but likely significant. The $5.8 billion debt (2012) of DWSD is money already spent primarily on maintenance and patching, so one can only imagine the actual number for necessary upgrades is multiples of that. Perhaps the shrinkage of the city and related triage mitigates it somewhat but complex systems have a way of confounding central planners, particularly inept ones.
If it takes as long for the rest of the cities in our country to slide as far down as Detroit has, we’ll have plenty to discuss over the next 30 years. As I’ve been quipping lately, ya don’t have to be blind to describe this elephant.
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An interesting view ‘from the inside’, JF. New York City could be seen as a variation on Detroit: Instead of an island of prosperity amidst general squalor, Manhattan’s ‘island’ is more like an archipelago, with rivulets of bohemian gentrification now spreading well into Harlem.
I’ll be curious to see whether Detroit, starting more-or-less fresh (albeit with still-huge financial obligations to retired municipal employees), can regenerate itself now that it has the deep-pocketed ‘sponsorship’ of Chinese speculators. I hope they find their way to Atlantic City, my home town, and plow the casinos into the ground so that the city can begin anew with beaches that were always beautiful. Unfortunately, even Chinese money will not suffice to regenerate upstate New York and Western PA, let alone the entire, run-down, overtaxed, underproductive, Democrat-electing Northeast. RA