THE
FATE OF THE WORLD
Written by Dr. Jack Wheeler

Wednesday,
12 May 2010

San
Diego, California.  The view from my Westin hotel room overlooks San Diego
Bay and the Pacific Ocean beyond.  The bay is filled with Navy warships,
huge cruise ships, and small sailboats.  The weather is perfect, 69°, and
the skies cloudless and smog-free. 

California!  The Golden State.  I grew up here, in the halcyon 1950s
portrayed in the Happy Days television series and the Surf City ode to it by the
Beach Boys.  So as I look out at the gorgeous view, I can’t help wonder: 
How is it possible that Californians screwed their state up so badly?

Because they ignored the warning of Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) after
traveling through America in 1832, that the greatest danger to America was no
external enemy but would come from within, when “the voters discover that they
can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury.”

The best investigative journalist in the country on state and local governments,
Steve Greenhut, has written a book explaining what California and so many other
states have done to themselves: Plunder:
How Public Employee Unions are Raiding Treasuries, Controlling Our Lives and
Bankrupting the Nation.

The $18.6 billion deficit in this year’s budget that Gov. Ahnold is promising “terrible
cuts” to fix is a bucket of water in the ocean of California‘s
$2.5 trillion owed to its public union employee workers in pension and other
benefits.

It’s over.  Game’s up.  Welcome to the fate of the world.

As gorgeous as this view of the Pacific Ocean is here, it can’t match the view
of the Mediterranean from the Greek island of Santorini.  TTPer Sal Danna
was kind enough to post some beautiful photos he took of the place on the Forum
last month.  Greece is the birthplace of political freedom and possesses
one of the world’s greatest goldmines of tourism.  How is it possible
that Greeks screwed their country up so badly?

Greece has a debt – a real debt on which it has to pay interest – of 130% of its
$350 billion GDP.  The $1 trillion bailout to prop up Greece and other
failing EU countries announced by the ECB (European Central Bank) Monday (5/10)
will make matters far worse.  Well-known investor Jim
Rogers called it “another nail in the coffin for the Euro.”

On the eve of the last TTP Rendezvous in San Antonio, in Let’s
Talk About The World (January 2010), you learned that in Europe:

“The smart money is shorting the Euro.  Today (1/28) it closed below
$1.40.  It won’t stop there, because the Euroweenies are wimping out on
making Greece be responsible for its financial prolificacy.  Which means
it’s a toboggan ride down the bailout slippery slope – first Greece, then
Portugal, the Spain, then Italy, then Ireland – dragging the Euro with them.”

Hope you were paying attention.  As I write this, the Euro is at $1.26. 

So here’s a prediction.  There’s soon going to be a European Tea Party
Movement and it will start in Germany.  The Euro was always a political
currency, a Euroweenie attempt to trick folks into believing a common European
currency could be as valuable as a German mark.  Now folks are figuring out
that the Euro is going to be worth a Greek drachma.

The Germans are going to explode in rage over this.  The first inkling was
last Sunday (5/09), when (as The
Barbers of Dusseldorf predicted) Merkel’s party got trashed in a regional
election that caused her to lose control of the upper chamber of Germany’s
parliament.  And that election was before Monday’s announcement that
Germans were on the hook for $200 bailout billions more.

With the mass-circulation Bild newspaper giant front-page headline, We Are the
Idiots of Europe!, and her cabinet and coalition government falling apart, there
is little wonder that tout Le allemagne is declaring open
season on Chancellor Angela.

The bailout package has to be submitted to the parliament Merkel no longer fully
controls for approval next week.  That’s going to be fun to watch.  

You’ve all heard the Chinese curse:  May you live in interesting times. 
Hinges of history are always interesting.  They are forks in the road,
where the world or an important part of it must choose between freedom and
cowardice.  We have arrived at such a fork, such a historical hinge.

Prominent economist Robert Samuelson has proclaimed the debt crisis from Greece
to California as “The
welfare state’s death spiral.”  But what sort of phoenix will arise
from the ashes of Western welfare states?  Will it be Western at all? 
Or will it be Chinese?

The West, albeit with peripheral exceptions like Australia and Chile, is taking
itself out of the game with anti-capitalism, financial collapse, and the
abandonment of its moral values. 

In 1973, the BBC produced a fascinating series called The
Ascent of Man, narrated by Jacob Bronowski, tracing the rise of man from
barbarism to civilization.  When he came to Western Civilization, he
concluded with a warning: 

We have been given no guarantee for civilizational supremacy that wasn’t given
to the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Romans and others on whom the page of
history has turned.  If we drop the torch, we can be sure that someone else
other than us will pick it up.

Are we about to drop the torch?  Americans have elected a man to lead them
who is determined to drop it, to toss America on the ash heap of history. 
He has accelerated the forces of collapse so quickly that the question of our
demise as the world’s leading economic and cultural power is upon us.

The moment of choice has arrived.  The debt load required to keep tax-taker
moochers in the life-style to which they’ve become accustomed – from Greece to
California – is unsustainable and will in fact collapse, inescapably and soon. 

The Germans are terrified of this, with solid historical justification. 
The last time their currency collapsed they got Adolph Hitler.  Very rarely
do people choose freedom instead of a man on a white horse when their problems
are dire.  Once they choose the latter, it’s difficult to take it back,
for the dictatorship’s purpose is to keep making those problems more dire. 
Poor people are so much easier to control.

I’m sure you’ve recognized that this dictatorship template is being adopted
by Zero and the Pelosicrats.

Yet it’s also critical to recognize that our collapse, the loss of our freedom
and prosperity, will not take place in a vacuum.  History will move on, and
focus elsewhere, almost certainly in Asia – which specifically means China and
India.

Today we have a president who kowtows, literally bows, to China.  Tomorrow,
unless Americans choose real actual pro-capitalist freedom in response to the
collapse of their welfare state economy – 40 million of them are on food stamps
now, 1 out of every 8 – all of them collectively as a nation will be kowtowing
to the Chinese.

That’s the fate of the world right now.  It’s our curse or our glory to
determine it.

We can take heart of another perspicacity of de Tocqueville’s, in the hope and
conviction that what he said about us in 1832 remains true today:

“The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other
nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.”